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LONGMANS' ENGLISH CLASSICS 

EDITED BY 

GEORGE RICE CARPENTER, A.B. 

PROFESSOR OF RHETORIC AND ENGLISH COMPOSITION IN COLiUMBIA UNIVERSITY 



THOMAS CARLYLE 



ON HEROES, HERO-WORSHIP, AND THE 
HEROIC IN HISTORY 



V 






JLongmang' €ng,Ue\) Claggicg 
THOMAS CARLYLE'S 

ON HEROES, HERO-WORSHIP, 

AND THE 

HEROIC IN HISTORY 

EDITED 

WITH NOTES AND AN INTRODUCTION 
BY 

HENRY DAVID GRAY, Ph.D. 

INSTRUCTOR IN ENGLISH IN LELAND STANFORD JUNIOR UNIVERSITY 




NEW YORK 
LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO. 

LONDON AND BOMBAY 
1906 



LIBRARY of CONGRESS 
Two CoDies Received 

I^AY 12 1906 

/^Copyright Entry 

CLASS CO^XXc. No. 
COPY B. 






COPYRIGHT, 1905 

BY 

LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO. 



All Bights Reserved 



PREFACE 

Carlyle's ** Heroes and Hero- Worship " is a difficult book 
for boys and girls who have not yet entered college. In- 
deed, there are few college students who would not be greatly 
troubled to get from it all the deep meaning there is in it. 
But, on the other hand, few books, if any, offer a better op- 
portunity for the exercise of the intellect and imagination of 
a student who will attack it thoroughly and systematically. 
On this account, the explanatory notes have been made 
as simple and straightforward as possible, with the idea of 
giving the student merely the information he needs for an 
understanding of the text, together with such comment or 
explanation as may help him over the difficult passages, and 
occasional reference to the more familiar authors who have 
expressed ideas akin to those of Carlyle. 

For the section of the Introduction on Carlyle's life I am 
indebted to Mr. Wilson Farrand of the Newark Academy, 
who has kindly allowed me to reprint the brief but admi- 
rable biographical sketch from his edition of Carlyle^s "Es- 
say on Burns" in this series. In my own introduction I 
have tried to keep in mind the student's point of view, and 
not to rob the pupil of the pleasure of noting at first hand 
the things which are obviously remarkable, nor to forestall 
the teacher's creative enthusiasm, without which the study 
of the "Heroes" would be of little value. 

The editor is of course indebted to the previous editions 
of the book. To the General Editor of the series he has also 
to express his gratitude for many kindly suggestions. 

Leland Stanford, Junior, University, 
February, 1906. 

H. D. G. 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

Introduction ix 

Suggestions for Teachers and Students xxvii 

Chronological Table xxxiii 

On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History 

Lecture I. The Hero as Divinity 1 

Lecture II. The Hero as Prophet ....... 41 

Lecture HI. The Hero as Poet 76 

Lecture IV. The Hero as Priest . ' 112 

Lecture V. The Hero as Man of Letters 149 

Lecture VI. The Hero as King 189 

Summary 236 

Notes . . , 244 



INTRODUCTION 



I. Thomas Carlyle. 

Thomas Carlyle is one of the most striking figures 
in the Hterary Hfe of the nineteenth century. He de- 
scribed himself as "a writer of books," and i't was to 
this end, the writing of books, that he devoted his 
life. His life was quiet and retired, and, to a consid- 
erable extent, was passed even in obscurity. His person- 
ality, however, made a niarked impression on all whom 
he met, and this, coupled with the interest roused by 
the intense individuality of his writings, has brought it 
about that the 3etails of his life and character are better 
known than those of almost any other author of recent 
times. With some writers, it is quite sufficient to know 
them only from their works, but with Carlyle the case is 
different. He was so impetuous, so intense, so uncon- 
ventional in thought and feeling, and these traits are so 
clearly reflected in his writing, that it is almost impossi- 
ble to appreciate his works rightly without some knowl- 
edge of the man. 

He was born in the little village of Ecclefechan, in the 
county of Dumfries, Scotland, on the 4th of December, 
1795. His father was a mason, and had built with his own 
hands the house in which his famous son was born. He 
was a man highly respected for his stern uprightness and 
thoroughness of work, while he evidently possessed a char- 
acter far above the ordinary in strength. Carlyle says of 
him : ''More remarkable man than my father I have never 



X INTRODUCTION 

met in my journey through life; sterling sincerity in 
thought, word, and deed; most quiet, but capable of blaz- 
ing into whirlwinds when needful; and such a flash of 
just insight and brief natural eloquence and emphasis, true 
to every feature of it, as I have never known in any other. " 
It is easy to see where Carlyle obtained some of his traits. 
His mother also was a woman of great force of character, 
although neither she nor her husband possessed the culture 
derived from books. 

Thomas was taught to read by his mother at a very early 
age. At'five his father began to teach him arithmetic and 
sent him to the village school. At seven, an Inspector of 
schools reported him to be '^ complete in English.'-' Latin 
he studied with the village minister, and at the age of 
ten he was sent to the grammar school at Annan. After 
four years here it was decided that he should enter the 
University of Edinburgh, and, accordingly, when not yet 
fourteen, he walked the eighty miles from Ecclefechan, 
and presented himself for admission. Comparatively little 
is known of his life at the university. He worked well, 
but apparently did more of general reading than of study. 
He won no prizes, although he distinguished himself in 
mathematics, but his intimate friends recognized his abil- 
ity, and prophesied his future distinction. When he com- 
pleted the course in arts in 1814, it was his intention to 
enter the ministry, but it was necessary to find some means 
of support until he was ready for ordination. Teaching 
seemed to offer the most available opening, and after com- 
petition, he Avas appointed mathematical tutor in his old 
school at Annan. After two years at Annan he received a 
similar appointment at Kirkcaldy, where he also remained 
two years. Carlyle did not like teaching — he was always 
intolerant of work prescribed — and in 1818 he concluded 
that "it were better to perish than to continue school- 
mastering," resigned his position, and went again to Edin- 



INTRODUCTION xi 

burgh. In the meantime he had definitely given up his 
idea of entering the ministry, and was seriously hesitating 
as to what career he should enter upon. 

The next three years spent in Edinburgh were, perhaps, 
the most wretched of his life. The dyspepsia, which tor- 
tured him so in later years, had already begun to trouble 
him, he was harassed by doubts as to what course in life 
he should follow, and he eked out a precarious existence 
while attending law lectures and reading, by teaching pri- 
vate pupils and writing hack articles for Brewster's " Edin- 
burgh Encyclopasdia. " 

In 1822, when Carlyle was twenty-six years of age, his 
friend, Edward Irving, procured him a position as tutor 
to the children of a wealthy family named Buller, at a 
salary of £200 a year. This position he held for two 
years. In the meantime he had completed and published 
his "Life of Schiller" and a translation of Goethe's 
^'Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship." These works 
brought him considerable reputation and some money. 
After about a year of freedom, Carlyle established himself 
at Hod dam Hill, a farm not far from his birthplace, leased 
for him by his father. His brother Alexander managed 
the farm, while Thomas occupied himself with writing — 
mostly translations from the German. 

In 1826 occurred one of the most momentous events in 
Carlyle's career, his marriage to Miss Welsh. Few unions 
of literary folk have caused so much discussion and com- 
ment as this marriage, and certainly nothing has done so 
much, whether rightly or wrongly, to injure the estimation 
in which Carlyle is held. What follows may seem to give 
undue emphasis to Carlyle's married life, but it should be 
remembered that in no other way is it possible to gain 
so clear an insight into his character. Jane Baillie Welsh 
was in many repects a most remarkable woman. Sprightly, 
clever, and even brilliant she undoubtedly was ; an only 



xii INTRODUCTION 

child, to a certain extent indulged and spoiled, she was also 
wilful and capricious, and her cleverness not infrequently 
took the form of sharpness. It was a strange courtship 
between these two — he, rugged, persistent, dominant, un- 
couth ; she, keen, clever, refined, discriminating ; but both 
with their common enjoyment and love of literature. At 
first Carlyle seems to have " excited her ridicule even more 
than he attracted her esteem." Gradually, however, their 
friendship deepened, and at last, after five years of ac- 
quaintance, she consented to marry. 

To their friends they appeared to be happily enough 
married, but when, after Mrs. Oarlyle's death, her letters 
and journal were published, there was revealed a tale of 
unhappiness and misery that called down a flood of exe- 
cration and revilement on the name of her unfortunate 
husband, and caused her to be glorified as a martyr to the 
whims of a man of genius. Time, and a realization of the 
fact that Mrs. Carlyle was as much given to exaggerating 
trifles as was her husband, have brought about a softening 
of this extreme view ; but even at the best, the story of 
their married life contains much that is pitiful. There 
was genuine affection on both sides, but the expression of 
that affection was painfully absent. Carlyle was undoubt- 
edly a difficult man to live with, and Mrs. Carlyle was 
most devoted in her efforts to shield him from annoj^ance. 
Always a sufferer from dyspepsia, he was very particular 
as to his food, and intolerant if things were not to his 
taste. Mrs. Carlyle learned to cook that she might make 
more certain of his being pleased. He was terribly sensi- 
tive to noise, and his work or his sleep was constantly being 
interrupted by some of the ordinary sounds of every-day 
life. Mrs. Carlyle, who shared this sensitiveness, was 
unwearied and most ingenious in her efforts to suppress or 
mitigate the neighboring dogs, roosters, hand-organs, par- 
rots, and pianos. In every way she slaved and denied 



INTRODUCTION xiii 

herself in order to leave his life as free as possible to devote 
to his writing. On the other hand, Carlyle was absorbed 
in his work, and accepted what she did for him as a matter 
of course. When things did not suit him he grumbled 
and growled in terrific fashion; when they went well he 
placidly continued his work, calmly indifferent to the 
pleasure and happiness that might have been given by the 
simplest expressions of appreciation and sympathy. 

But the blame was not all on one side. If Carlyle was 
grumpy and querulous^ Mrs. Carlyle was not a silent mar- 
tyr. 'She bore all sorts of drudgery for his sake, but not 
in silence. She did it, but she told of it afterward. Her 
feelings were as intense, and, in her way, she was as unrea- 
sonable as her husband. The ordinary accidents of domes- 
tic life were terrific in her eyes, and nothing was weakened 
in the telling of it. Nor did her sharp tongue spare her 
husband. She spoke her mind with freedom, and even was 
known to ridicule him to her friends before his face. 
Thirty years after their marriage she wrote, " I married 
for ambition, Carlyle has exceeded all that my wildest 
hopes ever imagined of him, and I am miserable." Again 
she wrote to a young friend, " My dear, whatever you 
do, never marry a man of genius." 

Their married life was what might have been expected. 
Carlyle was a man absolutely unsuited to domestic life. His 
intimate friend and biographer, Froude, says of him, " Of 
all the men I have ever seen, Carlyle was the least patient 
of the common woes of humanity. ' ' His writing was a 
passion with him; he was wholly absorbed in it to the ex- 
clusion of everything and every one else. It has been well 
said that what he needed was not a wife and companion, 
but a housekeeper and nurse. He chose *^ a woman almost 
as ambitious as himself, whose conversation was only less 
brilliant than his own, loyal to death, but, according to 
Mr. Froude, in some respects 'as hard as flint,' with 



xiv INTRODUCTION 

'dangerous sparks of fire/ whose quick temper found 
vent in sarcasms that blistered, and words like swords 
. . . who found herself obliged to live sixteen miles 
from the nearest neighbour, to milk a cow, scour floors, 
and mend shoes." Small wonder that there was unhap- 
piness in their union, and less that it was the more sensi- 
tive, less absorbed wife who suffered the most! And yet 
it should not be imagined that their life together was all 
bickering and unhappiness. Their marriage undoubtedly 
brought them a great deal of real happiness. Each had a 
genuine affection for the other. Mrs. Carlyle was proud 
of her husband's ability and success, and he of her bril- 
liance and charm. Their intellectual tastes were similar, 
and they enjoyed a great deal of delightful companionship. 
But Carlyle was unsuited to married life with anyone of 
feeling and sensitiveness, neither was adapted to enduring 
the trials of ordinary life, much less of comparative pov- 
erty, and the result was a union that has become proverbial 
for the suffering it brought. 

For eighteen months after their marriage they lived 
quietly at Edinburgh, Carlyle busy with his writing, and 
successful in having a number of articles accepted by the 
reviews. But these did not bring in sufficient money to 
support them, and in 1828 they decided to remove to 
Craigenputtock, a lonely little farm, sixteen miles from 
Dumfries, that belonged to Mrs. Carlyle by inheritance. 
Here, entirely removed from congenial friends, with one 
maid-servant and a boy, they lived for six years. For the 
wife the life there was terribly hard and lonely, but for 
Carlyle it was free from the annoyances and distractions of 
the town; and the six years of comparative solitude proved 
most important in the development of his power. Here 
he wrote the various articles printed in the first three vol- 
umes of his "Miscellanies," the best of which is gener- 
ally acknowledged to be the " Essay on Burns." He also 



INTRODUCTION XV 

wrote there ^' Sartor Eesartus," the most unique and orig- 
inal, and now one of the most popular of his works. He 
took the manuscript of this to London, and after appeal- 
ing to all the leading publishers in yain, succeeded in hav- 
ing it appear serially in " Eraser's Magazine." It was too 
strange, however, to be appreciated, and was received at 
first with scorn and ridicule. 

It had become evident that, if Carlyle was to succeed as 
an author, he must be near the large libraries, and more in 
touch with the literary life of the day. Accordingly, in 
1834, they moved to London, and settled in a little house 
in Cheyne Row, Chelsea. The first years in London were 
a continuation of the struggle for money and recognition. 
But success soon came. In 1837 Carlyle delivered a course 
of six lectures on '^ German Literature," which won him 
great applause and considerable money ; and this was 
followed by three other courses, the last of which was that 
on ^^Heroes, Hero- Worship, and the Heroic in History '^ 
(1840). Meanwhile the first volume of the '^French Rev- 
olution" had been published, and had won immediate 
recognition; and from that time Carlyle's position as an 
author was assured. The pecuniary independence of the 
Carlyles was further established by the death, in 1842, of 
Mrs. Carlyle 's mother, and the inheritance of her small 
property. This, and the success of Carlyle's work, put an 
end to the long struggle with narrow means. 

In 1845 he published his " Life and Letters of Oliver 
Cromwell," a book which sold more rapidly than any of 
his previous works, which caused him to be regarded as a 
most original historian, and which very materially modified 
the generally accepted opinions iu regard to the great Pro- 
tector. In 1858 appeared the first two volumes of his last 
great work, the "History of Frederick 11. , commonly 
called The Great," which was completed seven years later. 
This is by many regarded as his master work. 



xvf INTRODUCTION 

111 1865 he was elected Lord Eector by tlie students of 
Edinburgh University. This office is unlike anything that 
we have in this country, and is purely honorary, the only 
duty in connection with it being the delivery of an '^ In- 
stallation address." His address on the "Beading of 
Books," was "a perfect triumph," and may fairly be said 
to mark the culmination of his career. 

In the midst of this success in the north came the news 
of Mrs. Carlyle's sudden death in London. It was a ter- 
rible blow to the old man, already weakened by age, for, 
in spite of his complaining and his absorption in his work, 
he was devotedly attached to his wife, and wonderfully de- 
pendent on her. Not until she had gone from him did he 
realize how much unhappiness and suffering he had caused 
her. " Oh! " he cried, " if I could but see her once more, 
were it but for five minutes, to let her know that I always 
loved her through all that! She never did know it, 
never! " 

During the remaining fifteen years of his life, he wrote 
and published nothing of importance. He died at Chel- 
sea, February 5, 1881. The honor of burial in Westmin- 
ster Abbey was offered, but Carlyle had foreseen the possi- 
bility of this, and had decided before his death that it 
should not be. In accordance with his wish he was buried 
near his father and mother in the old kirkyard at Eccle- 
fechan. 

Carlyle appointed his intimate friend, James Anthony 
Eroude, the historian, his literary executor, giving him 
full discretion as to the making public of his and his wife's 
letters, journals, and private papers. Froude has been 
bitterly condemned for the freedom and fulness with which 
he has revealed the inmost details of the life at Oraigen- 
puttock and at Chelsea. Probably it would have been wiser, 
certainly it would have shown a tenderer regard for the 
memory of his friend, if he had withheld much that he 



INTRODUCTION xyii 

ha^ given to the public. Bat, on the other hand, he has 
given us most ample material for the study of the character 
of one of the most remarkable men of recent times. 

Carlyle was a strange man, with much in him that we 
are forced to condemn, but a man whom, with all his 
faults, we cannot help admiring. For forty years his life 
was one unceasing struggle against adverse circumstances. 
The persistent application to work and the privations of 
his early years brought on the dyspepsia which tormented 
him until his death, and which undoubtedly was the cause of 
much of his irritability and complaining. Harder still to 
bear was the lack of recognition and of appreciation of his 
work. Had he been willing to cater to others' ideas, had 
he been willing to shape his writing to conform to popular 
opinion, he undoubtedly could, with his ability, have 
greatly eased the pecuniary strain, and earlier have won 
popular applause. But in spite of the obstacles, and in 
the face of the temptations, he never wavered in his aim, 
but held true to his course in spite of all. He had a mis- 
sion in life, a message to deliver, and this mission he pro- 
posed to fulfil, this message to proclaim, come what might. 

Perhaps the most striking characteristic of the man was 
his love of Truth, and his hatred of insincerity and sham. 
Truth was to him a passion. In his writing he spared 
neither toil nor pains to secure the facts. His mission was 
to proclaim Truth, and nothing must stand in the way of 
that. Everything savoring of hypocrisy he hated with 
the veriest hatred, and the exposure of a sham ronsed all 
the powers of his nature. Whatever he felt, he felt deeply, 
and to whatever he undertook he gave all his energy. 

It is this sincerity, this intensity, this rugged strength, 
keeping on in spite of obstacles, that appeals to us. But 
with this strength there was a compensating inconsistency 
and weakness. Manful in enduring great ills, he was 
chafed and irritated by the little trials of life. The man 



xviii INTRODUCTION 

who conld make his first thought the sparing of the feel- 
ings of a friend through whose carelessness the manuscript 
of the entire first volume of the " French Eevolution " had 
been destroyed, and who could, with scarcely a murmur, 
take up the enormous work of rewriting it from the be- 
ginning, flew into a rage if his dinner were not properly 
cooked, and was inconsolable if a neighboring cock disturbed 
his night's rest. He did not always practise what he 
preached. He urged the duty of reticence, and yet no 
man was more outspoken about his personal troubles than 
he. It has been wittily said that he *^ preached the doc- 
trine of Silence in thirty volumes." His sense of propor- 
tion was lacking. He fulminated as strongly against a 
small thing as against a great, and he was prone to exag- 
gerate whatever was before him at the time. An earnest 
seeker after truth, when once he had formed an idea, he 
saw no other side to the question. 

In his personality, too, there was the same inconsistency. 
His appearance was striking and impressive, but at the same 
time uncouth. He had a most marvellous command of 
language, but he retained to the last his broad Annandale 
accent. His conversational powers were great, but his con- 
versation was mostly monologue. He had great charm 
and power of fascination, but his lack of tact often caused 
him to repel. 

Such was Oarlyle, a remarkable combination of strength 
and weakness, but with the strength predominating; a man 
to admire, rather than to love; a man of many faults and 
inconsistencies; whose judgment was not always sound; 
but of such sterling integrity, of such absolute honesty, 
BO noble in purpose, so lofty in aim, and so persistent in 
his devotion to that aim, as to compel our respect, and even 
our reverence. 



INTRODUCTION xix 

II. Heroes and Hero- Worship : 
ITS Scope, its Style, and its Significance. 

No one can read very far in this Book of Heroes without 
being surprised at many things. First of all, it will natu- 
rally occur to one that the heroes chosen form a very pecul- 
iar assemblage ; they are so different from one another and 
cover such a long stretch of time that we are tempted to 
wonder if Carlyle did not choose them at hap-hazard, or 
perhaps merely in order to startle us, or because he happened 
to know most about these particular men or to be especially 
interested in them. But we cannot believe that a man of 
Carlyle^s greatness would be swayed by trival motives, or 
could be so limited in his range of thought. As we read 
more of his life we find that we must look deeper if we would 
find why he groups these particular men together. 

It will be noted that the men chosen are only represent- 
ative of certain general types of heroes — of the hero as 
Divinity, the hero as Prophet, and so on. But why are 
these the right types to choose — or are they so? Are 
there not many other kinds of heroes just as notable as 
these six ? Why might we not have " The Hero as Artist," 
telling us of Raphael, Michael Angelo, and Titian; "The 
Hero as Musician," with Bach and Beethoven, Mozart and 
Handel for examples ; or, better still, " The Hero as Man of 
Science," in which there would be so many great men to 
choose from? Indeed, is there any end to the kinds of 
heroes we might name, or the great examples of them we 
might choose ? And again, what is the essential difference 
between the "Prophet" and the "Priest," or between the 
"Poet" and the "Man of Letters" ? You will notice the 
broad distinctions which Carlyle makeS; and the way he 
gradates from one into the other. But when we come to 



XX INTRODUCTION 

take other instances than those he mentions we do not find 
that his distinctions will hold. 

And so people are apt to feel at first that Carlyle's classi- 
fication lacks significance. Even his staunch and scholarly 
admirer, Professor MacMechan, writes in the introduction 
to his edition of this book : " His heroes are of six kinds 
simply and solely because he was booked to give two lec- 
trues a week for three weeks, half a dozen being a sort of 
sacred number in this respect." But while it is undoubt- 
edly true that convention did force this six-fold division 
upon Carlyle, it is no less true that convention forced a five- 
act division upon Shakespeare ; and it seems to me that 
Carlyle, no less than Shakespeare, tried to give his scheme 
a certain completeness, — to round it out into an artistic 
whole. If this is true, what plan can we discover in these 
lectures which will help us to see their artistic unity? 

There are two general plans suggested by the lectures 
themselves which might be taken as thus binding them 
together. The greatest worship we can render any hero is 
of course to make of him a " Divinity," and there are sug- 
gestions throughout the book that eaoii succeeding type of 
hero is of lesser consequence than those preceding, according 
to which plan the least reverence we could give a hero and 
leave him a hero at all would be to regard him as a king — 
as a political leader among men. But this descending 
scale is rather rudely upset when we read at the beginning 
of the last lecture that the " King " or " Commander " is " the 
most important .of great men." Carlyle is certainly not 
true to this plan of differentiation. We cannot say that a 
"Priest" is of less consequence than a "Poet," but more 
important than a "Man of Letters," nor that he is so re- 
garded by hero- worshipers. 

But it will be seen that this is also somewhat of a chrono- 
logical system. In the beginning of his lecture on "The 



INTRODUCTION xxi 

Hero as Prophet " Carlyle indicates that the time element is 
the determining factor; that the hero who would once have 
been regarded "as a God among his fellow men" is later 
looked upon simply as one who is " God-inspired/' that is, 
as a Prophet. But this plan also quickly falls to the ground. 
The King and the Poet are perhaps the earliest of heroes to 
arise among their fellow men; there were poets and prophets 
and kings in plenty before the time of Christ, whom Carlyle 
refers to as the great example of the Hero as Divinity, and 
poets and prophets and kings are living still. Even in his 
own list of heroes, though in the main chronological, there 
are two or three instances where the time order is violated. 
Moreover, Carlyle did not believe in that scientific " philoso- 
phy of history " which was beginning to be formulated in his 
own time, and which has recently become firmly established. 
To him it was sufficient that there was a certain gradation 
from one form of hero-worship to the next, and that the gen- 
eral development of " the heroic in history " was as he indi- 
cated, provided only that there should be something of a 
large completeness about the six types of heroes taken 
together. Ask, now, — to use an idiom of his own, — what 
is it that gives this "large completeness" to his study, if it 
is truly there ? 

This question will, I believe, be answered most satisfac- 
torily by finding the answer to another question which at 
first seems to be wholly unrelated to it. What is the cause 
of the peculiar style in which this book is v/ritten? Was 
there something in what Carlyle had to say, not only in this 
but in almost all of his writings, which might account for 
that peculiar style which we always associate with his 
name? For we notice not only his free use of capitals and 
dashes and exclamation points, but, deeper than this, the 
intense tone, the high emotion which seems to be intimately 
connected with — indeed to be the very cause of — these 



xxii INTRODUCTION 

unfinished sentences and exclamations. We have been 
taught that writing in this way is not to be encouraged, — 
that it implies that one is either ignorant of the laws of 
usage, or (which is even worse) is willing to defy them. ' 
Why, then, does Carlyle do so? 

Now, the very thing which sometimes leads an over- 
enthusiastic schoolgirl to fill her letters to her bosom friend 
with exclamation points and underscored words, is respon- 
sible also for Carlyle's use of these same devices ; — that is, 
in each case, the inabiUty to express thoughts in simple, 
straightforward English. But there is this great differ- 
ence. The thoughts of the schoolgirl are such as could be 
much better and more effectively expressed in completed 
sentences arranged in a normal order, whereas Carlyle's 
thoughts would be much weakened if they were readjusted 
in any such fashion ; — or, at least, that is the way it seems 
to some of us who like Carlyle all the more for his perver- 
sities and eccentricities. A copy-book is a most excellent 
model for a child who is just learning to write ; but when 
one has acquired a strong, well-formed handwriting of his 
own, his writing is much better than that of any copy-book. 

But there are other things than eccentricities and faults in 
this style. We must not forget the rhythm, — the harmony, 
we might better say — that there is in much if not most of 
what Carlyle has written. In what he says when consider- 
ing the Hero as Poet, about the necessity for certain kinds 
of thoughts to take on a musical form, is to be found an 
admirable vindication of his own manner of writing. Car- 
lyle himself had much in common with the " vates Poet " ; 
and though for various reasons his thought did not " break 
out" into song, there was still much of that " inward neces- 
sity to be rhymed" which led him away from the regular 
prose poem, and resulted in his use of such poetic devices as 
alUteration and assonance and even rhyme itself. When he 



INT ROD UCTION xxiii 

says, " I would advise anyone who can speak his thought not 
to sing it," he is as good as saying to us, " If you have not 
thoughts which jump out of your brain with an eagerness 
to be spoken that cannot wait for the slow process of exact 
sentence structure, then do not use my dashes and exclama- 
tion points." 

But if Carlyle's peculiarities of style are to be justified 
because his emotion and his earnest endeavor to be true to 
himself in speaking his thoughts really called them out, then 
the next thing we naturally ask is,' what was the message 
which he had for men that could so arouse him as to make 
his speaking in plain and simple terms impossible; what 
is the essence of that appeal which comes to us more than 
half a century later with such undiminished force that we 
listen eagerly, and forgive the curiousness, the " barbarity " 
if it be such, of the style ? The answer to this is the answer 
to our original question also. 

And the answer is not far to seek. We cannot read far in 
the book itself without finding out what subject was at the 
basis of Carlyle's thought ; and we find it is the only sub- 
ject which will lead men to the high impassioned utterance 
which we have here. Nothing but religious enthusiasm 
could so often break through the bounds of set rules and 
yet result in such a splendid form of its own. It is from 
the point of view of their religious significance that the 
types of heroes are chosen and arranged; and it is Carlyle's 
religious message which makes the style at once so pecul- 
iar and so appropriate. 

But this assertion needs some proof before it can be 
accepted as an explanation. Many men have had as deep 
religious convictions as Carlyle, but no one else has written 
in his peculiar manner. Of course, to a certain extent a 
man's style is simply an expression of his personality, and 
so essential an expression of it that we have come to say, 



xxiv INTRODUCTION 

"style is the man." We must make full allowance for this 
in Carlyle's case, as in every case. But there remain to be 
accounted for, even after making this deduction, the two 
chief characteristics which we have noted — the directness, 
even abruptness, with which he almost "blurts out" his 
convictions, and the wonderful restraint underneath, which 
makes his style great instead of merely crude and barbaric. 
Have these two prime characteristics of his style their cor- 
relatives and causes in Carlyle's religious message? 

Regarding our religion, there are two main principles, 
each somewhat restraining and modifying the other, which 
Carlyle is equally eager to insist upon. First, we must be 
absolutely sincere in what we believe to be the truth, abso- 
lutely loyal to our deepest convictions'; but, on the other 
hand, we should not be cheap radicals or iconoclasts, for the 
great man^s duty is obedience to the existing order, whenever 
that is possible or right. This, then, is the answer to the 
second of our inquiries, the cause of Carlyle's peculiar style. 
Sincerity growing out of an impassioned conviction will 
inevitably compel a man to speak abruptly — brokenly, 
even — if the feeling be intense enough; and a deep rev- 
erence for law and order will give us the underlying har- 
mony as well. 

If,, now, we would find the essential unity in these six 
classes of heroes, we must examine the rest of Carlyle's 
message. If there should ever come a conflict between the 
hero's call to be sincere and his obedience to the existing 
order of things, then the obedience must go down before the 
sincerity. Sincerity always remains the chief essential of 
Carlyle's hero. No better proof of this need be given than 
that he chooses Rousseau for one of his heroes, even though 
it be for his faultiest and least heroic — Rousseau, who was 
one of the most extreme iconoclasts of all time, who was so 
largely responsible for the French Revolution itself, and 



INTRODUCTION xxv 

who was still sincere in his convictions. But most of Car- 
lyle's heroes would gladly have avoided any destruction or 
disturbance if they could. Notice how he insists on the 
reluctance of Mahomet and of Luther to make their first 
departure from the old order of things. 

From this follows inevitably the third of Carlyle's car- 
dinal virtues^that of tolerance. We must reverence sin- 
cerity wherever we find it, even though the convictions of 
our hero are the very opposite of our own; our hero may 
believe whatever he will, if only his conviction be deep and 
true. And so our list of heroes must represent sincerity and 
truth in whatever form it is possible for truth and sincerity 
to occur. There is truth in Paganism, in Mahometanism, 
in every error which has had any large following among 
men; so Paganism and Mahometanism, as well as Catholic 
and Protestant Christianity, together with faith in the in- 
tellectual age of skepticism and faith in the broad field of 
action, must all be represented. Are not, then, his heroes 
as broadly typical as any we might choose? 

But for any easy-going contentment with the mere 
"shows" of things — that is, for any failure to recognize 
things at their true worth as the man of deep sincerity 
always does — ^we are to have no tolerance whatever. Pagan- 
ism may have truth in it, but not skepticism. Our atti- 
tude, if we are ever to know the truth when we see it, 
must be a believing attitude. Without faith in the ultimate 
meaning of the great mystery of the universe, we should 
have to content ourselves with some such ineffectual philos- 
opny as that of the eighteenth-century materialists and 
utilitarians, whom Carlyle is never weary of condemning. 
Belief is the fourth of Carlyle's cardinal virtues. 

Enough now if we see what is the essential connection of 
his main lines of thought in their practical application. Our 
duty is sincerity first of all, and with it as much obedience as 



xxvi INTRODUCTION. 

is possible )— tolerance, then, but raised by reverence for 
true greatness to the more positive side of hero-worship; — | 
but jaith ever, through which alone we may be able to know | 
the truth when we see it; then fearlessness, the readiness to ^ 
stand by what we believe, no matter who or what may rise \ 
up against us; and finally, when we have seen and done our j 
best — silence. ] 

Of these last two, what need is there to speak ? They ' 
are but corollaries of Carlyle's four cardinal virtues, and 
are only the most prominent of many. The thing to 
notice is that they are not isolated virtues — these six and 
the others — and things which go without saying simply 
because they are virtues — ^but that there is a single con- 
sistent man at the bottom of Carlyle's ideal hero. With 
what force of conviction and splendor of descriptive phrase 
he makes his ideal stand out more and more clearly before 
us, no one will fail to notice; but what is not so apparent is 
the coherence of his thought underlying his perversity of 
manner. The student will, however, fill out for himself the 
suggestions here given, and in doing so he will come to see 
why this book has had so great an influence upon so many 
intelUgent and even remarkable men. 



SUGGESTIONS FOR TEACHERS 
AND STUDENTS 

What is the prime importance of the " Heroes and Hero- 
Worship " for the young student? It will be found as 
thought-provoking as any book, perhaps, which could pos- 
sibly be placed in his hands. After the first few lessons 
the average pupil will become greatly puzzled; if he has 
not been allowed to pass over the ideas hurriedly, getting 
only a vague, general sort of notion from them, there will 
inevitably arise in his mind a sort of " transcendent wonder '^ 
at this Carlyle, and a general dissatisfaction with himself 
that he cannot quite get hold of these ideas, which 

" tease him out of thought 
As doth eternity." 

This state of mind should by all means be encouraged 
until the dissatisfaction becomes full and ripe. For so 
long as the student is content to live "in the shows of 
things " and is not bothered by the author's inner meaning, 
Carlyle has no message for him whatever, and the book, 
no matter how minutely it may have been studied, is a 
closed book to him. When, however, the questionings 
and " puzzlements " begin to come, the student should be 
assured that what he is going through is no new thing in the 
world — that everyone who has thought at all has had these 
same perplexities — that the meaning of it all will become 
clearer as he reads on. Thfe final interpretation of it all 
must not be laid down by any superior intellect; if the book 
is to have its chief value for him, the student must be 
allowed free play for his own intellect. 

When, therefore, the pupil begins to be puzzled by Car- 



xxviii SUGGESTIONS FOR TEACHERS 

lyle's lecture on " The Hero as Divinity/' the road must not 
be made too easy for him. Set him definitely to work. Let 
him see if Carlyle is thoroughly consistent. Let him dis- 
cover that he must be read qualifiedly and guardedly.. 
When he finds that he may learn of Carlyle without accept- 
ing all he says as the absolute truth, the perplexity will 
begin to disappear, and he will have learned at first hand 
two of Carlyle's own doctrines — that there is much fun- 
damental truth in every form of religion — and, more 
important still, that we must be thoroughly sincere, open- 
minded, and fearless in the examination of our own be- 
liefs as well as those of others. Thus the reiteration of 
these ideas in Carlyle will have a concrete rather than a gen- 
eral and abstract significance ; and the student will acquire 
a habit of definite thinking, of substantiating his opinions 
by systematic study and research, which should be of the 
greatest conceivable value to him all through life. No 
vague glimmerings of ideas should be tolerated ; the student 
must try to chase down the hazy notion he has, until he sees 
exactly what his notion is. 

For the next greatest sin to dependence of thinking is 
contentment with mere approximations to ideas. If the 
student gets some sort of idea from a passage, he is in- 
clined to accept that as near enough; and his fear of being 
thought stupid or his natural reticence prevents his in- 
quiring further. Every teacher knows the difficulty here. 
He will ask if there are " any questions " on this passage. 
There are none. Is there anything that is not " perfectly 
clear"? There seems to be nothing. Then just what is 
the meaning of so-and-so? There are some troubled and 
faltering attempts at an answer, some attempted evasions, 
and final confessions of ignorance. Against this mam- 
moth inertia the teacher has a most difficult battle to 
wage; without an inspiring theme the most enthusiastic 



SUGGESTIONS FOR TEACHERS xxix 

teacher will needs grow faint in the perpetual struggle. It 
is here that the "Heroes and Hero- Worship " offers its 
inestimable service. Carlyle's own untiring energy will 
awaken some response in the miost sluggish student; and 
an active concern with problems vital to us all cannot fail 
to call forth the very best which the student has to give. 

If I am right, then, in feeling that this book of Carlyle's is 
potent to arouse the young student to think, — to think 
"other things," as one student first vaguely expressed it,- 
before he could say what was causing the trouble within 
him, — and if learning to think independently and with 
greater exactitude is indeed the prime aim of education, 
then it follows as a matter of course that whatever leads 
away from the accomplishment of this aim is open to a seri- 
ous charge, and must justify itself before high courts of 
tribunal. Such, it seems, would be the substituting of cer- 
tain lesser benefits which might be better gained from other 
works and writers — the study, that is, of the formal side of 
the text. No one doubts the force and wonderful appro- 
priateness of Carlyle's diction in his best passages ; but why 
not let the student notice this for himself, until the oddity of 
it or something taking a deeper hold on him leads him at 
last to speak it out for himself ? The right kind of teaching 
will inevitably bring this out of the student's newly awak- 
ened consciousness. And what is there to teach about Car- 
lyle's sentence-structure or his paragraphing? Addison 
and Macaulay may well be vivisected for the purpose of 
analyzing these ; and the result of the study there may be 
highly profitable, as we all know. But Carlyle's sentences, 
except rarely, are the most vicious models imaginable for 
the young; worse than the merely bad, we might say, 
because of the dimly recognizable but wholly unattainable 
good that is in them. We may teach that they are excel- 
lent, somehow, underneath — ^but of what practical value 



XXX SUGGESTIONS FOR TEACHERS. 

is that to the student? He might answer, paraphrasing, 

with : 

" If they be not good for me 
What care I how good they be?" 

And what strength and value there is in them will make 
itself felt as surely as the strange excellence of the die-' 
tion, long before the student has finished with the study of 
the book. The same thing may be said, though with less 
positiveness, of the study of the merely informational refer- 
ences which are given in the Notes. If the student gets a 
sufficient knowledge of that to which Carlyle refers to give 
the passage in question its full connotation, what conceiv- 
able value is there in his committing to memory this partic- 
ular scrap of detached information rather than some other? 

But the question now arises, how, more definitely, shall 
we teach the thought of the book? Is not it there, most 
obviously, for the student to see, if he is capable of seeing it 
at all? Certainly it will never do simply to reiterate Car- 
lyle's ideas in our own less impassioned words, or to over- 
explain them, or to attempt any weak refutation. In these 
narrow limits I can suggest only a few possible exercises 
which relate especially to the study of this book, and leave 
all the rest to the teacher's own insight and experience. 

In the first place, I think the class should begin at once 
with the text, and so far as possible be led to look into the 
Introduction by the interest which the study of the text 
should arouse. As will be noticed most readily from his 
own summary, Carlyle passes abruptly from his opening 
contention that history consists of the biographies of great 
men, to his curious and involved definition of religion. 
What is the underlying logical connection in these thoughts? 
Why does he have to pass from the first to the second of these 
ideas? In the Notes and Introduction I have attempted to 
supply some of the more difficult of these connecting links, 



SUGGESTIONS FOR TEACHERS xxxi 

and the student may turn to this as to a practical handbook 
to aid him in his study of the text. 

But to aid him further in acquiring something of the 
spirit of an original investigator — of a true scholar, may we 
say? — there are easier, more mechanical exercises that he 
may be led to undertake. So simple a thing as marking 
the aphorisms as he comes to them and making them into 
a " Carlyle Calendar " might be useful in its way. But of 
more value, and leading to a comprehension of the book 
which he will get in no other way, would be the collating of 
similar passages — finding in what he has already read a 
former statement of this same idea and making cross-refer- 
ences in the margin. These, of course, should be discov- 
ered, not dictated. This task will not fail to interest the 
class and arouse a certain pride of competition. Better 
still, it will lead to the amplifying and clarifying of Car- 
lyle's main ideas, by which exercise the student's own hab- 
its .of thinking will be improved. 

But if it is only writing that maketh an exact man, it will 
not be until some of these things are definitely tabulated on 
paper or written out in the form of paragraph themes that 
the full good of them will be attained ; and work of this kind 
should be prescribed. What characteristics does Carlyle 
name in describing each and every one of his heroes? What 
further traits appear in all but one or two? By such ques- 
tions let the pupils frame Carlyle's final definition of a hero, 
and with it compare their own previous or present opinions. 
Was Carlyle himself a hero by his own definition? Was he 
unduly influenced by his own simple and rugged nature in 
the framing of his ideas of a hero? Can the students find 
from any of the books put at their disposal any such in- 
stances in Carlyle's life as would do for anecdotes like those 
he is so fond of employing? And finally — a most difficult 
but fascinating task — could they write a character sketch 



xxxii SUGGESTIONS FOR TEACHERS 

of Carlyle somewhat in Carlyle's own manner, describing 
him as " The Hero as Portrayer of Heroes " ? 

These suggestions are put as questions which the individ- 
ual teacher, gauging his particular class, must answer for 
himself. He may read, or to better advantage tell, a fuller 
account of Carlyle's life than is here given, taking his cue 
from any passage which suggests it; he may give a much 
fuller and more correct account of the various heroes them- 
selves, or of certain portions of their lives. He may com- 
bine these by showing how Carlyle's conception of such-and- 
such a hero was influenced by certain things in his own life 
or character. I have omitted all such discussions from the 
Introduction and Notes, for they are the rightful province 
of the teacher; and they must not be dumped down upon 
the student, but filled in from time to time as the occasion 
permits or requires. Indeed, if the editor's province is the 
giving of a correct text, with such introduction and notes 
as he considers may put the student in the way of prepar- 
ing most readily and with least confusion what he needs to 
know when he comes to class to discuss — not to recite — the 
lesson, the much higher and more difficult task of the 
teacher is this " filling in " or " rounding out " of the stu- 
dent's previous and incomplete ideas. For this purpose 
all other editions of the text should be at hand, as well as 
such other works concerning Carlyle as are most readily 
procurable. All that a teacher reads on his subject, even 
if it is not of the greatest value in itself, contributes its 
share toward giving him that fulness of view and that solid 
basis of fact upon which so largely depends that wealth of 
resource from which alone the "connotation" of the text 
can be supplied. 



CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE 
CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE 



XXXlll 



Carlyle's Life and Works 



1795. Bom. 



1809-14. At Edinburgh University. 



1814-24. Years of struggle. 
1814-18. Engaged in teaching. 



1818. Determines to live by his pen, 



1822-24. Private tutor. 

1823. First published work : Life of 

Schiller. 

1824-34. Years of development. 

1824. Translation of Wilhelm Meister. 

1826. Marries Jane Welsh. 

1828-38. Retires to Craigenputtock and 
develops in solitude and si- 
lence. 

1833. Sartor Resartus. 

1834. Moves to Chelsea. 



1834-51. Years of greatest production. 

1837. The French Revolution. 
1841. Heroes and Hero-Worship. 

1843. Past and Present. 

1845. Life and Letters of Cromwell. 



Contemporary Literature 



1798. Wordsworth and Coleridge, Lyri- 
cal Ballads. 

1805. Scott, Lay of the Last Minstrel. 

1812. Byron. Childe Harold (cantos 

i. and ii.), 

1813. Southey. Life of Nelson. 



1816. Shelley, Alastor. 

1817. Bryant, Thanatopsis. Moore, Lalla 

Rookh. 

1818. Keats, Endymion. 

1821. De Quincey, Confessions of an 

Opium-Eater. 
1832. Lamb, Essays of Elia. 



1824. Irving, Tales of a Traveller. 

1825. Macaulay, Essay on Milton. 

1826. Cooper, Last of the Mohicans. 



1834. Bancroft, History of the United 
States, vol. i. Bulwer, Last 
Days of Pompeii. 

1836. Dickens, Pickwick Papers. 

Holmes, Poems. 

1837. Hawthorne, Twice-Told Tales. 

Prescott, Ferdinand and Isa- 
bella. Whittier, Poems. 

1841. Browning, Pippa Passes. Emer- 
son, Essays. 

1843. Ruskin, Modern Painters (vol. i.). 

1844. Elizabeth Barrett (Browning), 

Poems. 

1845. Poe, The Raven and other Poems. 

1847. Longfellow, Evangeline. Thack- 

eray, Vanity Fair. Tennyson, 
The Princess. 

1848. Lowell, The Bigelow Papers. 

1849. Parkman, California and the Or- 

egon Trail. 



xxxiv CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE 

CHRONOLOGICAL TKBl.'E— Continued 



CARLYLE's Life and Works 


Contemporary Literature 


1850. Latter-day Pamphlets, 
laol. Life of John Sterling. 


1851. 


Spencer, Social Statics. 


1851-65. Steady, gloomy work : unhap- 
piness and ill-health. 


ia59. 


Darwin, Origin of Species. 




1861. 


George Eliot, Silas Marner. 




1864. 


Swinburne, Atalanta in Calydon. 
Newman, Apologia. 


1865. History of Frederic the Great. 


1865. 


Arnold, Essays in Criticism. 


1866. Death of Mrs. Carlyle. 


1866. 


Howells, Venetian Life. 


1875. Early Kings of Norway. Portraits 
of John Knox. 


1875. 
1878. 


Meredith, Beanchamp's Career. 
Henry James, The Europeans. 


1881. Died. 


1881. 


Stevenson, Virglnibus Puerisque. 



ON 

HEROES, HERO-WORSHIP, 

AND 

THE HEEOIO IW HISTORY 



LECTURE I. 



THE HERO AS DIVINITY. ODIN. PAGANISM! SCANDINAVIAN 

MYTHOLOGY. 

[Tuesday, 5th May 1840.] 

We have undertaken to discourse here for a httle on Great 
Men, their manner of appearance in our world's business, 
how they have shaped themselves in the world's history, 
what ideas men formed of them, what work they did; — on 
Heroes, namely, and on their reception and performance; 
what I call Hero-worship and the Heroic in human affairs. 
Too evidently this is a large topic; deserving quite other 
treatment than we can expect to give it at present. A 
large topic; indeed, an illimitable one; wide as Universal 
History itself. For, as I take it, Universal History, the 
history of what man has accomplished in this world, is at 
bottom the History of the Great Men who have worked 
here. They were the leaders of men, these great ones; 
the modellers, patterns, and in a wide sense creators, of 
whatsoever the general mass of men contrived to do or to 
attain; all things that we see standing accomplished in the 
world are properly the outer material result, the practical 
realisation and embodiment, of Thoughts that dwelt in the 
Great Men sent into the world : the soul of the whole world's 
1 1 



2 LECTURES ON HEROES 

history, it may justly be considered, were the history of 
these. Too clearly it is a topic we shall do no justice to in 
this place! 

One comfort is, that Great Men, taken up in any way, 
are profitable company. We cannot look, however im- 
perfectly, upon a great man, without gaining something by 
him. He is the living light-fountain, which it is good and 
pleasant to be near. The light which enlightens, which 
has enlightened the darkness of the world; and this not as 
a kindled lamp only, but rather as a natural luminary 
shining by the gift of Heaven ; a flowing light-fountain, as 
I say, of native original insight, of manhood and heroic 
nobleness; — in whose radiance all souls feel that it is well 
with them. On any terms whatsoever, you will not grudge 
to wander in such neighbourhood for a while. These Six 
classes of Heroes, chosen out of widely-distant countries 
and epochs, and in mere external figure differing altogether, 
ought, if we look faithfully at them, to illustrate several 
things for us. Could we see them well, we should get some 
glimpses into the very marrow of the world's history. How 
happy, could I but, in any measure, in such times as these, 
make manifest to you the meanings of Heroism; the divine 
relation (for I may well call it such) which in all times unites 
a Great Man to other men; and thus, as it were, not exhaust 
my subject, but so much as break ground on it! At all 
events, I must make the attempt. 

It is well said, in every sense, that a man's religion is the 
chief fact with regard to him. A man's, or a nation of 
men's. By religion I do not mean here the church-creed 
which he professes, the articles of faith which he will sign 
and, in words or otherwise, assert; not this wholly, in many 
cases not this at all. We see men of all kinds of professed 
creeds attain to almost all degrees of worth or worthlessness 
under each or any of them. This is not what I call religion, 
this profession and assertion; which is often only a pro- 
fession and assertion from the outworks of the man, from 
the mere argumentative region of him, if even so deep as 



THE HERO AS DIVINITY 3 

that. But the thing a man does practically believe (and 
this is often enough vjithout asserting it even to himself, 
much less to others) ; the thing a man does practically lay 
to heart, and know for certain, concerning his vital relations 
to this mysterious Universe, and his duty and destiny there, 
that is in all cases the primary thing for him, and creatively 
determines all the rest. That is his religion; or, it may be, 
his mere scepticism and no-religion: the manner it is in 
which he feels himself to be spiritually related to the Unseen 
World or No- World ; and I say, if you tell me what that is, 
you tell me to a very great extent what the man is, what 
the kind of things he will do is. Of a man or of a nation 
we inquire, therefore, first of all. What religion they had^ 
Was it Heathenism, — plurality of gods, mere sensuous rep- 
resentation of this Mystery of Life, and for chief recognised 
element therein Physical Force? Was it Christianism; 
faith in an Invisible, not as real only, but as the only reality; 
Time, through every meanest moment of it, resting' on 
Eternity; Pagan empire of Force displaced by a nobler 
supremacy, that of Holiness? Was it Scepticism^ uncer- 
tainty and inquiry whether there was an Unseen World, 
any Mystery of Life except a mad one; — doubt as to all this, 
or perhaps unbelief and flat denial? Answering of this 
question is giving us the soul of the history of the man or 
nation. The thoughts they had were the parents of the 
actions they did; their feelings were parents of their 
thoughts: it was the unseen and spiritual in them that 
determined the outward and actual; — their religion, as I 
say, was the great fact about them. In these Discourses, 
limited as we are, it will be good to direct our survey chiefly 
to that religious phasis of the matter. That once known 
well, all is known. We have chosen as the first Hero in our 
series, Odin the central figure of ScandinaAdan Paganism; 
an emblem to us of a most extensive province of things. 
Let us look for a little at the Hero as Divinity, the oldest 
primary form of Heroism. 

Surely it seems a very strange-looking thing this Pagan- 
ism; almost inconceivable to us in these days. A be- 



4 LECTURES ON HEROES 

wildering, inextricable jungle of delusions, confusions, 
falsehoods and absurdities, covering the whole field of Life ! 
A thing that fills us with astonishment, almost, if it were 
possible, with incredulity, — for truly it is not easy to under- 
stand that sane men could ever calmly, with their eyes open, 
believe and live by such a set of doctrines. That men 
should have worshipped their poor fellow-man as a God, 
and not him only, but stocks and stones, and all manner of 
animate and inanimate objects; and fashioned for them- 
selves such a distracted chaos of hallucinations by way of 
Theory of the Universe : all this looks like an incredible fa- 
ble. Nevertheless it is a clear fact that they did it. Such 
hideous inextricable jungle of misworships, misbeUefs, men, 
made as we are, did actually hold by, and live at home in. 
This is strange. Yes, we may pause in sorrow and silence 
over the depths of darkness that are in man; if we rejoice 
in the heights of purer vision he has attained to. Such 
things were and are in man; in all men; in us too. 

Some speculators have a short way of accounting for the 
Pagan religion : mere quackery, priestcraft, and dupery, say 
they; no sane man ever did believe it, — merely contrived to 
persuade other men, not worthy of the name of sane, to 
believe it ! It will be often our duty to protest against this 
sort of hypothesis about men's doings and history; and I 
here, on the very threshold, protest against it in reference 
to Paganism, and to all other isms by which man has ever 
for a length of time striven to walk in this world. They 
have all had a truth in them, or men would not have taken 
them up. Quackery and dupery do abound; in religions, 
above all in the more advanced decaying stages of religions, 
they have fearfully abounded : but quackery was never the 
originating influence in such things; it was not the health 
and life of such things, but their disease, the sure precursor 
of their being about to die! Let us never forget this. It 
seems to me a most uigumful hypothesis, that of quackery 
giving birth to any faith even in savage men. Quackery 
gives birth to nothing; gives death to all things. We shall 
not see into the true heart of anything, if we look merely 



THE HERO AS DIVINITY 5 

at the quackeries of it; if we do not reject the quackeries 
altogether; as mere diseases, corruptions, with which our 
and all men's sole duty is to have done with them, to sweep 
them out of our thoughts as out of our practice. Man 
everywhere is the born enemy of lies. I find Grand Lama- 
ism itself to have a kind of truth in it. Read the candid, 
clear-sighted, rather sceptical Mr. Turner's Account of his 
Embassy to that country, and see. They have their belief, 
these poor Thibet people, that Providence sends down 
always an Incarnation of Himself into every generation. 
At bottom some belief in a kind of Pope ! At bottom still 
better, belief that there is a Greatest Man; that he is dis- 
coverable; that, once discovered, we ought to treat him with 
an obedience that knows no bounds ! This is the truth of 
Grand Lamaism; the 'discoverability' is the only error 
here. The Thibet priests have methods of their own of 
discovering what Man is Greatest, fit to be supreme over 
them. Bad methods : but are they so much worse than our 
methods, — of understanding him to be always the eldest- 
born of a certain genealogy? Alas, it is a difficult thing to 

find good methods for ! ^We shall begin to have a chance 

of understanding Paganism, when we first admit that to 
its followers it was, at one time, earnestly true. Let us con- 
sider it very certain that men did believe in Paganism; men 
with open eyes, sound senses, men made altogether like our- 
selves; that we, had we been there, should have believed in 
it. Ask now, What Paganism could have been? 

Another theory, somewhat more respectable, attributes 
such things to Allegory. It was a play of poetic minds, 
say these theorists; a shadowing-forth, in allegorical fable, 
in personification and visual form, of what such poetic 
minds had known and felt of this Universe. Which agrees, 
add they, with a primary law of human nature, still every- 
where observably at work, though in less important things. 
That what a man feels intensely, he struggles to speak-out 
of him, to see represented before him in visual shape, and as 
if with a kind of life and historical reahty in it. Now 
doubtless there is such a law, and it is one of the deepest in 



6 LECTURES ON HEROES 

human nature; neither need we doubt that it did operate 
fundamentally in this business. The hypothesis which 
ascribes Paganism wholly or mostly to this agency, I call 
a little more respectable; but I cannot yet call it the true 
hypothesis. Think, would we believe, and take with us as 
our life-guidance, an allegory, a poetic sport? Not sport 
but earnest is what we should require. It is a most earnest 
thing to be alive in this world ; to die is not sport for a man. 
Man's life never was a sport to him; it was a stern reaUty, 
altogether a serious matter to be alive ! 

I find, therefore, that though these Allegory theorists 
are on the way towards truth in this matter, they have not 
reached it either. Pagan Religion is indeed an Allegory, 
a Symbol of what men felt and knew about the Universe; 
and all Religions are symbols of that, altering always as that 
alters: but it seems to me a radical perversion, and even 
inversion, of the business, to put that forward as the origin 
and moving cause, when it was rather the result and termi- 
nation. To get beautiful allegories, a perfect poetic symbol, 
was not the want of men; but to know what they were to 
believe about this Universe, what course they were to steer 
in it; what, in this mysterious Life of theirs, they had to 
hope and to fear, to do and to forbear doing. The Pilgrim's 
Progress is an Allegory, and a beautiful, just and serious 
one: but consider whether Bunyan's Allegory could have 
jyreceded the Faith it symbolises! The Faith had to be 
already there, standing believed by everybody; — of which 
the Allegory could then become a shadow; and, with all its 
seriousness, we may say a sportful shadow, a mere play of 
the Fancy, in comparison with that awful Fact and scientific 
certainty which it poetically strives to emblem. The Alle- 
gory is the product of the certainty, not the producer of 
it; not in Bunyan's nor in any other case. For Paganism, 
therefore, we have still to inquire. Whence came that scien- 
tific certainty, the J)arent of such a bewildered heap of 
allegories, errors and confusions? How was it, what was it? 

Surely it were a foolish attempt to pretend ' explaining, ' 
in this place, or in any place, such a phenomenon as that 



THE HERO AS DIVINITY 7 

far-distant distracted cloudy imbroglio of Paganism, — more 
like a cloudfield than a distant continent of firm land and 
facts ! It is no longer a reality, yet it was one. We ought 
to understand that this seeming cloudfield was once a 
reality; that not poetic allegory, least of all that dupery and 
deception was the origin of it. Men, I say, never did be- 
lieve idle songs, never risked their souFs life on allegories: 
men in all times, especially in early earnest times, have had 
an instinct for detecting quacks, for detesting quacks. Let 
us try if, leaving out both the quack theory and the allegory 
one, and listening with affectionate attention to that far-off 
confused rumour of the Pagan ages, we cannot ascertain so 
much as this at least. That there was a kind of fact at the 
heart of them; that they too were not mendacious and dis- 
tracted, but in their own poor way true and sane! 

You remember that fancy of Plato's, of a man who had 
grown to maturity in some dark distance, and was brought 
on a sudden into the upper air to see the sun rise. What 
would his wonder be, his rapt astonishment at the sight we 
daily witness with indifference! With the free open sense 
of a child, yet with the ripe faculty of a man, his whole 
heart would be kindled by that sight, he would discern it 
. well to be Godlike, his soul would fall down in worship before 
it. Now, just such a childlike greatness was in the primitive 
nations. The first Pagan Thinker among rude men, the 
first man that began to think, was precisely this child-man 
of Plato's. Simple, open as a child, yet with the depth and 
strength of a man. Nature had as yet no name to him; 
he had not yet united under a name the infinite variety of 
sights, sounds, shapes and motions, which we now collect- 
ively name Universe, Nature, or the like, — ^.and so with a 
name dismiss it from us. To the wild deep-hearted man all 
was yet new, not veiled under names or formulas; it stood 
naked, flashing-in on him there, beautiful, awful, unspeak- 
able. Nature was to this man, what to the Thinker and 
Prophet it forever is, preternatural. This green flowery 
rock-built earth, the trees, the mountains, rivers, many- 



8 LECTURES ON HEROES 

sounding seas; — that great deep sea of azure that swims 
overhead; the winds sweeping through it; the black cloud 
fashioning itself together, now pouring out fire, now hail 
and rain ; what is it? Ay, what? At. bottom we do not yet 
know; we can never know at all. It is not by our superior 
insight that we escape the difficulty; it is by our superior 
levity, our inattention, our want of insight. It is by not 
thinking that we cease to wonder at it. Hardened round 
us, encasing wholly every notion we form, is a wrappage of 
traditions, hearsays, mere words. We call that fire of the 
black thunder-cloud 'electricity,' and lecture learnedly 
about it, and grind the Hke of it out of glass and silk; but 
what is it? What made it? Whence comes it? Whither 
goes it? Science has done much for us; but it is a poor 
science that would hide from us the great deep sacred infin- 
itude of Nescience, ''whither we can never penetrate, on 
which all science swims as a mere superficial film. This 
world, after all our science and sciences, is still a miracle; 
wonderful, inscrutable, magical and more, to whosoever 
will think of it. 

That great mystery of Time, were there no other; the 
illimitable, silent, never-resting thing called Time, rolling, 
rushing on, swift, silent, like an all-embracing ocean-tide, 
on which we and aU the Universe swim like exhalations, like 
apparitions which are, and then are not: this is forever very 
literally a miracle; a thing to strike us dumb, — for we have 
no word to speak about it. This Universe, ah me — what 
could the wild man know of it; what can we yet know? 
That it is a Force, and thousandfold Complexity of Forces ; 
a Force which is not we. That is all; it is not we, it is alto- 
gether different from us. Force, Force, everywhere Force; 
we ourselves a mysterious Force in the centre of that. 
' There is not a leaf rotting on the highway but has Force 
in it: how else could it rot?' Nay surely, to the Atheistic 
Thinker, if such a one were possible, it must be a miracle 
too, this huge, inimitable whirlwind of Force, which en- 
velops us here; never-resting whirlwind, high as Immensity, 
old as Eternity. What is it? God's creation, the religious 



THE HERO AS DIVINITY 9 

people answer; it is the Almighty God's! Atheistic science 
babbles poorly of it, with scientific nomenclatures, experi- 
ments and what-not, as if it were a poor dead thing, to be 
bottled-up in Leyden jars and sold over counters: but the 
natural sense of man, in all times, if he will honestly apply 
his sense, proclaims it to be a living thing, — ah, an unspeak- 
able godlike thing; towards which the best attitude for us, 
after never so much science, is awe, devout prostration and 
humility of soul; worship if not in words, then in silence. 

But now I remark farther: What in such a time as ours 
it requires a Prophet or Poet to teach us, namely, the strip- 
ping-off of those poor undevout wrappages, nomenclatures 
and scientific hearsays, — this, the ancient earnest soul, as 
yet unemcumbered with these things, did for itself. The 
world, which is now divine only to the gifted, was then 
divine to whosoever would turn his eye upon it. He stood 
bare before it face to face. 'All was Godlike or God:' — 
Jean Paul still finds it so; the giant Jean Paul, whp has 
power to escape out of hearsays: but there then were no 
hearsays. Canopus shining-down over the desert, with its 
blue diamond brightness (that wild blue spirit-like bright- 
ness, far brighter than we ever witness here) , would pierce 
into the heart of the wild Ishmaelitish man, whom it was 
guiding through the solitary waste there. To his wild 
heart, with all feelings in it, with no speech for any feeling, 
it might seem a little eye, that Canopus, glancing-out on 
him from the great deep Eternity; revealing the inner 
Splendour to him. Cannot we understand how these men 
worshipped Canopus; became what we call Sabeans, wor- 
shipping the stars? Such is to me the secret of all forms of 
Paganism. Worship is transcendent wonder; wonder for 
which there is now no limit or measure; that is worship. 
To these primeval men, all things and everything they saw 
exist beside them were an emblem of the Godlike, of some 
God. 

And look what perennial fibre of truth was in that. To 
us, also, through every star, through every blade of grass, is 
not a God made visible, if we will open our minds and eyes? 



10 LECTURES ON HEROES 

i 

We do not worship in that way now:* but is it not reckoned 
still a merit, proof of what we call a ' poetic nature, ' that 
we recognise how every object has a divine beauty in it; 
how every object still verily is 'a window through which 
we may look into Infinitude itself? He that can discern 
the loveliness of things, we call him Poet, Painter, Man of 
Genius, gifted, lovable. These poor Sabeans did even what 
he does, — in their own fashion. That they did it, in what 
fashion soever, was a merit: better than what the entirely 
stupid man did, what the horse and camel did, — namely, 
nothing ! 

But now if all things whatsoever that we look upon are 
emblems to us of the Highest God, I add that more so than 
any of them is man such an emblem. You have heard of St. 
Chrysostom's celebrated saying in reference to the Shekinah, 
or Ark of Testimony, visible Revelation of God, among the 
Hebrews: "The true Shekinah is Man!" Yes, it is even 
so: this is no vain phrase; it is veritably so. The essence 
of our being, the mystery in us that calls itself " I, " — ah, 
what words have we for such things? — is a breath of Heaven; 
the Highest Being reveals itself in man. This body, these 
faculties, this life of ours, is it not all as a vesture for that 
Unnamed? 'There is but one Temple in the Universe,' 
says the devout Novalis, 'and that is the Body of Man. 
'Nothing is holier than that high form. Bending before 
'men is a reverence done to this Revelation in the Flesh. 
' We touch Heaven when we lay our hand on a human body ! ' 
This sounds much like a mere flourish of rhetoric; but 
it is not so. If well meditated, it will turn out to be a 
scientific fact; the expression, in such words as can be had, 
of the actual truth of the thing. We are the miracle of 
miracles, — the great inscrutable mystery of God. We can- 
not understand it, we know not how to speak of it; but we 
may feel and know, if we like, that it is verily so. 

Well ; these truths were once more readily felt than now. 
The young generations of the world, who had in them the 
freshness of young children, and yet the depth of earnest 
men, who did not think that they had finished-off all things 



THE HERO AS DIVINITY 11 

in Heaven and Earth by merely giving them scientific 
names, but had to gaze direct at them there, with awe and 
wonder: they felt better what of divinity is in man and 
Nature ;— they , without being mad, could worship Nature, 
and man more than anything else in Nature. Worship, 
that is, as I said above, admire without limit: this, in the 
full use of their faculties, with all sincerity of heart, they 
could do. I consider Hero- Worship to be the grand modi- 
fying element in that ancient system of thought. What I 
called the perplexed jungle of Paganism sprang, we may 
say, out of many roots: every admiration, adoration of a 
star or natural object, was a root or fibre of a root; but 
Hero-worship is the deepest root of all; the tap-root, from 
which in a great degree all the rest were nourished and 
grown. 

And now if worship even of a star had some meaning in 
it, how much more might that of a Hero! Worship of a 
Hero is transcendent admiration of a Great Man. I say 
great men are still admirable; I say there is at bottom, 
nothing else admirable! No nobler feeling than this of 
admiration for one higher thalThimself dwells in the breast 
of man. It is to this hour, and at all hours, the vivifying 
Inffuenc'e in man's life. Religion I find stand upon it; not 
Paganism only, but far higher and truer religions, — all 
religion hitherto known. Hero-worship, heartfelt, pros- 
trate admiration, submission, burning, boundless, for a 
noblest godlike Form of Man, — is not that the germ of 
Christianity itself? The greatest of all Heroes is One — 
whom we do not name here! Let sacred silence meditate 
that sacred matter; you will find it the ultimate perfection 
of a principle extant throughout man's whole history on 
earth. 

Or coming into lower, less t^nspeakable provinces, is not 
all Loyalty akin to religious Faith also? Faith is loyalty to 
some inspired Teacher, some spiritual Hero. And what 
therefore is loyalty proper, the life-breath of all society, but 
an effluence of Hero-worship, submissive admiration for the 
truly great? Society is founded on Hero-worship. All | 



12 LECTURES ON HEROES 

dignities of rank, on which human association rests, are 
what we may call a HerosbYchy (Government of Heroes), — 
or a Hierarchy, for it is ' sacred ' enough withal ! The Duke 
means Dux, Leader ; King is Kbn-ning, Kan-ning, Man that 
knows or cans. Society everywhere is some representation 
not insupportably inaccurate, of a graduated Worship of 
Heroes ; — reverence and obedience done to men really great 
and wise. Not msupportably inaccurate, I say ! They are 
all as bank-notes, these social dignitaries, all representing 
gold; — and several of them, alas, always are forged notes. 
We can do with some forged false notes ; with a good many 
even; but not with all, or the most of them forged! No: 
there have to come revolutions then; cries of Democracy, 
Liberty and Equality, and I know not what: — the notes 
being all false, and no gold to be had for them, people take to 
crying in their despair that there is no gold, that there never 
was any! — 'Gold,' Hero-worship, is nevertheless, as it was 
always and everywhere, and cannot cease till man himself 
ceases. 

I am well aware that in these days Hero-worship, the 
thing I call Hero-worship, professes to have gone out, and 
finally ceased. This, for reasons which it will be worth 
while some time to inquire into, is an age that as it were 
denies the existence of great men; denies the desirableness 
of great men. Show our critics a great man, a Luther for 
example, they begin to what they call ' account ' for him; not 
to worship him, but take the dimensions of him, — and bring 
him out to be a little kind of man ! He was the ' creature of 
the Time, ' they say; the Time called him forth, the Time did 
everything, he nothing — but what we the httle critic could 
have done too! This seems to me but melancholy work. 
The Time call forth? Alas, we have known Times call 
loudly enough for their great man; but not find him when 
they called! He was not there; Providence had not sent 
him; the Time, calling its loudest, had to go down to con- 
fusion and wreck because he would not come when called. 

For if we will think of it, no Time need have gone to ruin, 
could it have found a man great enough, a man wise and 



THE HERO AS DIVINITY 13 

good enough: wisdom to discern truly what the Time 
wanted, valour to lead it on the right road thither; these are 
the salvation of any Time. But I liken common languid 
Times, with their unbelief, distress, perplexity, with their 
languid doubting characters and embarrassed circum- 
stances, impotently crumbling-down into ever worse distress 
towards final ruin; — all this I liken to dry dead fuel, waiting 
for the lightning out of Heaven that shall kindle it. The 
great man, with his free force direct out of God's own hand, 
is the lightning. His word is the wise healing word which 
all can believe in. All blazes round him now, when he has 
once struck on it, into fire like his own. The dry moulder- 
ing sticks are thought to have called him forth. They did 
want him greatly ; but as to calling him forth — ! — Those are 
critics of small vision, I think, who cry: "See, is it not the 
sticks that made the fire?" No sadder proof can be given 
by a man of his own littleness than disbelief in great men. 
There is no sadder symptom of a generation than such gen- 
eral blindness to the spiritual lightning, with faith only in 
the heap of barren dead fuel. It is the last consummation 
of unbelief. In all epochs of the world's history, we shall 
find the Great Man to have been the indispensable saviour 
of his epoch; — the lightning, without which the fuel never 
would have burnt. The History of the World, I said 
already, was the Biography of Great Men. 

Such small critics do what they can to promote unbelief 
and universal spiritual paralysis: but happily they cannot 
always completely succeed. In all times it is possible for a 
man to arise great enough to feel that they and their doc- 
trines are chimeras and cobwebs. And what is notable, in 
no time whatever can they entirely eradicate out of living 
men's hearts a certain altogether peculiar reverence for 
Great Men; genuine admiration, loyalty adoration, how- 
ever dim and perverted it may be. Hero-worship endures 
forever while man endures. Bos well venerates his Johnson, 
right truly even in the Eighteenth century. The unbehev- 
ing French beheve in their Voltaire; and burst-out round 
him into very curious Hero-worship, in that last act of his 



14 LECTURES ON HEROES 

life when they ' stifle him under roses. ' It has always 
seemed to me extremely curious this of Voltaire. Truly, if 
Christianity be the highest instance of Hero-worship, then 
we may find here in Voltaireism one of the lowest! He 
whose life was that of a kind of Antichrist, does again on this 
side exhibit a curious contrast. No people ever were so 
little prone to admire at all as those French of Voltaire. 
Persiflage was the character of their whole mind; adoration 
had nowhere a place in it. Yet see ! The old man of Ferney 
comes up to Paris; an old, tottering, infirm man of eighty- 
four years. They feel that he too is a kind of Hero ; that he 
has spent his life in opposing error and injustice, delivering 
Calases, unmasking hypocrites in high places ;^n short that 
he too, though in a strange way, has fought like a valiant 
man. They feel withal that, if persiflxige be the great thing, 
there never was such a persifleur. He is the realised ideal 
of every one of them ; the thing they are all wanting to be ; 
of all Frenchmen the most French. He is properly their 
god, — such god as they are fit for. Accordingly all persons, 
from the Queen Antoinette to the Douanier at the Porte 
St. Denis, do they not worship him? People of quahty dis- 
guise themselves as tavern-waiters. The Maitre de Poste, 
with a broad oath, orders his Postillion, " Va hon train; thou 
art driving M. de Voltaire. " At Paris his carriage is ' the 
nucleus of a comet, whose train fills whole streets. ' The 
ladies pluck a hair or two from his fur, to keep it as a sacred 
relic. There was nothing highest, beautifulest, noblest in 
all France, that did not feel this man to be higher, beau- 
tifuler, nobler. 

Yes, from Norse Odin to English Samuel Johnson, from 
the divine Founder of Christianity to the withered Pontiff of 
Encyciopedism, in all times and places, the Hero has been 
worshipped. It will ever be so. We all love great men; 
love, venerate and bow down submissive before great men: 
nay can we honestly bow down to anything else? Ah, does 
not every true man feel that he is himself made higher by 
doing reverence to what is really above him? jjiajipbler 
or more blessed feeling dwells in man's heart. ^ And to me 



THE HERO AS DIVINITY 15 

it is very cheering to consider that no sceptical logic, or gen- 
eral triviality, insincerity and aridity of any Time and its 
influences can destroy this noble inborn loyalty and worship 
that is in man. In times of unbelief, which soon have to 
become times of revolution, much down-rushing, sorrowful 
decay and ruin is visible to everybody. For myself in these 
days, I seem to see in this indestructibility of Hero-worship 
the everlasting adamant lower than which the confused 
wreck of revolutionary things cannot fall. The confused 
wreck of things crumbling and even crashing and tumbling 
all round us in these revolutionary ages, will get down so far ; 
no farther. It is an eternal corner-stone, from which they 
can begin to build themselves up again. That man, in some 
sense or other, worships Heroes ; that we all of us reverence 
and must ever reverence Great Men: this is, to me, the living 
rock amid all rushings-down whatsoever; — the one fixed 
point in modern revolutionary history, otherwise as if bot- 
tomless and shoreless. 

So much of truth, only under an ancient obsolete vesture, 
but the spirit of it still true, do I find in the Paganism of old 
nations. Nature is still divine, the revelation of the work- 
ings of God ; the Hero is still worshipable : this, under poor 
cramped, incipient forms, is what all Pagan religions have 
struggled, as they couldj to set forth. I think Scandinavian 
Paganism, to us here, is more interesting than any other. It 
is, for one thing-, the latest; it continued in these regions of 
Europe till the eleventh century: eight-hundred years ago 
the Norwegians were still worshippers of Odin. It is inter- 
esting also as the creed of our fathers ; the men whose blood 
still runs in our veins, whom doubtless we still resemble in so 
many ways. Strange: they did believe that, while we be- 
lieve so differently. Let us look a little at this poor Norse 
creed, for many reasons. We have tolerable means to do 
it ; for there is another point of interest in these Scandina- 
vian mythologies: that they have been preserved so well. 

In that strange island Iceland, — burst-up, the geologists 
say, by fire from the bottom of the sea; a wild land of bar- 



16 LECTURES ON HEROES 

renness and lava; swallowed many months of every year in 
black tempests, yet with a wild gleaming beauty in summer- 
time ; towering up there, stern and grim, in the North Ocean ; 
with its snow jokuls, roaring geysers, sulphur-pools and 
horrid volcanic chasms, like the waste chaotic battle-field of 
Frost and Fire; — where of all places we least looked for 
Literature or written memorials, the record of these things 
was written down. On the seaboard of this wild land is a 
rim of grassy country where cattle can subsist, and men by 
means of them and of what the sea yields; and it seems 
they were poetic men these, men who had deep thoughts 
in them, and uttered musically their thoughts. Much 
would be lost had Iceland not been burst-up from the sea, 
not been discovered by the Northmen! The old Norse 
poets were many of them natives of Iceland. 

Saemund, one of the early Christian Priests there, who 
perhaps had a lingering fondness for Paganism, collected 
certain of their old Pagan songs, just about becoming ob- 
solete then, — Poems or Chants of a mythic, prophetic, 
mostly all of a religious character: that is what Norse critics 
call the Elder or Poetic Edda. Edda, a word of uncertain 
etymology, is thought to signify Ancestress. Snorro Sturle- 
son, an Iceland gentleman, an extremely notable personage, 
educated by this Sa^mund's grandson, took in hand next, 
near a century afterwards, to put together, among several 
other books he wrote, a kind of Prose Synopsis of the whole 
Mythology; elucidated by new fragments of traditionary 
verse. A work constructed really with great ingenuity, 
native talent, what one might call unconscious art; alto- 
gether a perspicuous clear work, pleasant reading still : this 
is the Younger or Prose Edda. By these and the numerous 
other Sagas, mostly Icelandic, with the commentaries, Ice- 
landic or not, which go on zealously in the North to this day, 
it is possible to gain some direct insight even yet; and see 
that old Norse system of Belief, as it were, face to face. Let 
us forget that it is erroneous Religion; let us look at it as 
old Thought, and try if we cannot sympathise with it some- 
what. 



THE HERO AS DIVINITY 17 

The primary characteristic of this old Northland My- 
thology I find to be Impersonation of the visible workings 
of Nature. Earnest simple recognition of the workings of 
Physical Nature, as a thing wholly miraculous, stupendous 
and divine. What we now lecture of as Science, they won- 
dered at, and fell down in awe before, as Religion. The 
dark hostile Powers of Nature they figure to themselves as' 
' Jotuns, ' Giants, huge shaggy beings of a demonic character. 
Frost, Fire, Sea-tempest; these are Jotuns. .The friendly 
Powers again, as Summer-heat, the Sun, are Gods. The 
empire of this Universe is divided between these two; they 
dwell apart, in perennial internecine feud. The Gods dwell 
above in Asgard, the Garden of the Asen, or Divinities; 
Jdtunheim, a distant dark chaotic land, is the home of the 
Jotuns. 

Curious all this; and not idle or inane, if we will look at 
the foundation of it ! The power of Fire, or Flame, for in- 
stance, which we designate by some trivial chemical name, 
thereby hiding from ourselves the essential character of 
wonder that dwells in it as in all things, is with these old 
Northmen, Loke, a most swift subtle Demon, of the brood of 
the Jotuns. The savages of the Ladrones Islands too (say 
some Spanish voyagers) thought Fire, which they never had 
seen before, was a devil or god, that bit you sharply when 
you touched it, and that lived upon dry wood. From us too 
no Chemistry, if it had not Stupidity to help it, would hide 
that Flame is a wonder. What is Flame? — Frost the old 
Norse Seer discerns to be a monstrous hoary Jotun, the Giant 
Thrym, Hrym; or Rime, the old word now nearly obsolete 
here, but still used in Scotland to signify hoar-frost. Rime 
was not then as now a dead chemical thing, but a living 
Jotun or Devil ; the monstrous J5tun Rime drove home his 
Horses at night, sat ' combing their manes, ' — which Horses 
were Hail-Clouds, or fleet Frost-Winds. His Cows — No, not 
his, but a kinsman's, the Giant Hymir's Cows are Icebergs: 
this Hymir ' looks at the rocks ' with his devil-eye, and they 
split in the glance of it. 

Thunder was not then mere Electricity, vitreous or resin- 
2 



18 LECTURES ON HEROES 

ous; it was the God Donner (Thunder) or Thor, — God also 
of beneficent Summer-heat. The thunder was his wrath; 
the gathering of the black clouds is the drawing-down of 
Thor's angry brows ; the fire-bolt bursting out of Heaven is 
the all-rending Hammer fiung from the hand of Thor: he 
urges his loud chariot over the mountain- tops, — that is the 
peal; wrathful he ' blows in his red beard, ' — that is the rus- 
tling stormblast before the thunder begins. Balder again, 
the White God, the beautiful, the just and benignant (whom 
the early Christian Missionaries found to resemble Christ) , is 
the Sun, — beautifiilest of visible things; wondrous too, and 
divine still, after all our Astronomies and Almanacs ! But 
perhaps the notablest god we hear tell-of is one of whom 
Grimm the German Et3^mologist finds trace: the God 
Wunsch, or Wish. The God Wish; who could give us all 
that we wished! Is not this the sincerest and yet rudest 
voice of the spirit of man? The rudest ideal that man ever 
formed; which still shows itself in the latest forms of our 
spiritual culture. Higher considerations have to teach us 
that the God Wish is not the true God. 

Of the other Gods or Jotuns I will mention only for 
etymology's sake, that Sea-tempest is the Jotun Aegir, a 
very dangerous Jotun; — and now to this day, on our river 
Trent, as I learn, the Nottingham bargemen, when the River 
is in a certain flooded state (a kind of backwater, or eddying 
swirl it has, very dangerous to them) , call it Eager; they cry 
out, "Have a care, there is the Eager coming!" Curious; 
that word surviving, like the peak of a submerged world! 
The oldest Nottingham bargemen had believed in the God 
Aegir. Indeed our English blood too in good part is Danish, 
Norse; or rather, at bottom, Danish and Norse and Saxon 
have no distinction, except a superficial one, — as of Heathen 
and Christian, or the like. But all over our Island we are 
mingled largely with Danes proper, — from the incessant 
invasions there were: and this, of course, in a greater pro- 
portion along the east coast; and greatest of all, as I find, 
in the North Country. From the Humber upwards, all over 
Scotland, the Speech of the common people is still in a 



THE HERO AS DIVINITY 19 

singular degree Icelandic ; its Germanism has still a peculiar 
Norse tinge. They too are ' Normans, ' Northmen, — if that 
be any great beaut}^ ! — 

Of the chief god, Odin, we shall speak by and by. Mark 
at present so much; what the essence of Scandinavian and 
indeed of all Paganism is: a recognition of the forces of 
Nature as godlike, stupendous, personal Agencies, — as Gods 
and Demons. Not inconceivable to us. It is the infant 
Thought of man opening itself, with awe and wonder, on this 
ever-stupendous Universe. To me there is in the Norse 
System something very genuine, very great and manlike. 
A broad simpHcity, rusticity, so very different from the light 
gracefulness of the old Greek Paganism, distinguishes this 
Scandinavian System. It is Thought; the genuine Thought 
of deep, rude, earnest minds, fairly opened to the things 
about them; a face-to-face and heart-to-heart inspection of 
the things, — the first characteristic of all good Thought in 
all times. Not graceful lightness, half-sport, as in the Greek 
Paganism; a certain homely truthfulness and rustic strength, 
a great rude sincerity, discloses itself here. It is strange, 
after our beautiful Apollo statues and clear smiling my- 
thuses, to come down upon the Norse Gods 'brewing ale' 
to hold their feast with Aegir, the Sea-J5tun; sending out 
Thor to get the caldron for them in the Jotun country; Thor, 
after many adventures, clamping the Pot on his head, Hke a 
huge hat, and walking off mth it, — quite lost in it, the ears 
of the Pot reaching down to his heels! A kind of vacant 
hugeness, large awkward gianthood, characterises that 
Norse System; enormous force, as yet altogether untutored, 
stalking helpless with large uncertain strides. Consider 
only their primary niythus of the Creation. The Gods, 
having got the Giant Ymer slain, a Giant made by ' warm 
wind, ' and much confused work, out of the conflict of Frost 
and Fire, — determined on constructing a world with him. 
His blood made the Sea; his flesh was the Land, the Rocks 
his bones; of his eyebrows they formed Asgard their Gods'- 
dwelling; his skull was the great blue vault of Immensity, 
and the brains of it became the Clouds. What a Hyper- 



20 LECTURES ON HEROES 

Brobdignagian business ! Untamed Thought, great, giant- 
like, enormous ; — to be tamed in due time into the compact 
greatness, not giantlike, but godlike and stronger than 
gianthood, of the Shakspeares, the Goethes! — Spiritually 
as well as bodily these men are our progenitors. 

I like, too, that representation they have of the Tree 
Igdrasil. All Life is figured by them as a Tree. Igdrasil, 
the Ash-Tree of Existence, has its roots deep-down in the 
kingdoms of Hela or Death; its trunk reaches up heaven- 
high, spreads its boughs over the whole Universe: it is the 
Tree of Existence. At the foot of it, in the Death-ldngdom, 
sit Three Nomas, Fates, — the Past, Present, Future ; water- 
ing its roots from the Sacred Well. Its ' boughs, ' with their 
buddings and disleafings, — events, things suffered, things 
done, catastrophes, — stretch through all lands and times. 
Is not every leaf of it a biograph}^, ever}^ fibre there an act or 
word? Its boughs are Histories of Nations. The rustle of 
it is the xxoise of Human Existence, onwards from of old. 
It grows there, the breath of Human Passion rustling 
through it; — or stormtost, the stormwind howling through 
it like the voice of all the gods. It is Igdrasil, the Tree of 
Existence. It is the past, the present, and the future ; what 
was done, what is doing, what will be done; ' the infinite con- 
jugation of the verb To do.' Considering how human 
things circulate, each inextricably in communion with all, — 
how the word I speak to you Jo^ay is borrowed, not from 
Ulfila the Moesogoth only, but from all men since the first 
man began to speak, — I find no similitude so true as this of 
a Tree. Beautiful; altogether beautiful and great. The 
'Machine of the Universe,/ — alas, do but think of that in 
contrast! 

Well, it is strange enough, this old Norse view of Nature; 
different enough from what we believe of Nature. Whence 
it specially came, one would not like to be compelled to say 
very minutely! One thing we may say: It came from the 
thoughts of Norse men; — from the thought, above all, of the 
first Norse man who had an original power of thinking. The 



THE HERO AS DIVINITY 21 

First Norse 'man of genius, ' as we should call him! Innu- 
merable men had passed by, across this Universe, with a 
dumb vague wonder, such as the very animals may feel; or 
with a painful, fruitlessly inquiring wonder, such as men 
only feel; — till the great Thinker came, the original man, the 
Seer; whose shaped spoken Thought awakes the slumbering 
capability of all into Thought. It is ever the way with the 
Thinker, the Spiritual Hero. What he says, all men were 
not far from saying, were longing to say. The Thoughts of 
all start up, as from painful enchanted sleep, round his 
Thought; answering to it. Yes, even so! Joyful to men as 
the dawning of day from night; — is it not, indeed, the awak- 
ening for them from no-being into being, from death into 
life? We still honour such a man; call him Poet, Genius, 
and so forth : but to these wild men he was a very magician, 
a worker of miraculous unexpected blessing for them; a 
Prophet, a God! — Thought once awakened does not again 
slumber; unfolds itself into a System of Thought'fgrows, in 
man after man, generation after generation, — till its full 
stature is reached, and such System of Thought can grow 
no farther, but must give place to another. 

For the Norse people, the Man now named Odin, and 
Chief Norse God, we fancy, was such a man. A Teacher, 
and Captain of soul and of body; a Hero, of worth immeas- 
urable; admiration for whom, transcending the known 
bounds, became adoration. Has he not the power of artic- 
ulate Thinking; and many other powers, as yet miraculous? 
So, with boundless gratitude, would the rude Norse heart 
feel. Has he not solved for them the sphinx-enigma of this 
Universe; given assurance to them of their own destiny 
there? By him they know now what they have to do here, 
what to look for hereafter. Existence has become articu- 
late, melodious by him; he first has made Life alive! — We 
may call this Odin, the origin of Norse Mythology : Odin, or 
whatever name the First Norse Thinker bore while he was 
a man among men. His view of the Universe once pro- 
mulgated, a. like view starts into being in all minds; grows, 
keeps ever growing, while it continues credible there. In 



- 22 LECTURES ON HEROES 

all minds it lay written, but invisibly, as in sympathetic ink; 
at his word it starts into visibility in all. Nay, in every 
epoch of the world, the great event, parent of all others, is 
it not the arrival of a Thinker in the world !— 

One other thing we must not forget; it will explain, a 
little, the confusion of these Norse Eddas. They are not 
one coherent System of Thought; but properly the sum- 
mation of several successive systems. All this of the old 
Norse belief which is fiung-out for us, in one level of distance 
in the Edda, like a picture painted on the same canvas, 
does not at all stand so in the reality. It stands rather 
at all manner of distances and depths, of successive genera- 
tions since the Belief first began. All Scandinavian think- 
ers, since the first of them, contributed to that Scandinavian 
System of Thought; in ever-new elaboration and addition, 
it is the combined work of them all. What history it had, 
how it changed from shape to shape, by one thinker^s con- 
tribution after another, till it got to the full final shape we 
see it under in the Edda, no man will now ever know: its 
Councils of Trebisond, Councils of Trent, Athanasiuses, 
Dantes, Luthers, are sunk without echo in the dark night! 
Only that it had such a history we can all know. Where- 
soever a thinker appeared, there in the thing he thought-of 
was a contribution, accession, a change or revolution made. 
Alas, the grandest ' revolution ' of all, the one made by the 
man Odin himself, is not this too sunk for us like the rest ! 
Of Odin what history? Strange rather to reflect that he had 
a history ! That this Odin, in his wild Norse vesture, with 
his wild beard and eyes, his rude Norse speech and ways, 
was a man like us; with our sorrows, joys, with our limbs, 
features; — intrinsically all one as we: and did such a work! 
But the work, much of it, has perished; the worker, all to 
the name. "Wednesday," men will say tomorrow; Odin's 
day! Of Odin there exists no history; no document of it; 
no guess about it worth repeating. 

Snorro indeed, in the quietest manner, almost in a brief 
business style, writes down, in his Heimskringla, how Odin 
was a heroic Prince, in the Black-Sea region, with Twelve 



THE HERO AS DIVINITY 23 

Peers, and a great people straitened for room. How he led 
these Asen (Asiatics) of his out of Asia; settled them in the 
North parts of Europe, by warlike conquest; invented Let- 
ters, Poetry and so forth, — and came by and by to be wor- 
shipped as Chief God by these Scandinavians, his Twelve 
Peers made into Twelve Sons of his own, Gods like himself: 
Snorro has no doubt of this. Saxo Grammaticus, a very 
curious Northman of that same century, is still more un- 
hesitating; scruples not to find out a historical fact in every 
individual mythus, and writes it down as a terrestrial event 
in Denmark or elsewhere. Torfseus, learned and cautious, 
some centuries later, assigns by calculation a date for it: 
Odin, he says, came into Europe about the Year 70 before 
Christ. Of all which, as grounded on mere uncertainties, 
found to be untenable now, I need say nothing. Far, very 
far beyond the Year 70! Odin's date, adventures, whole 
terrestrial figure and environments are sunk from us forever 
into unknown thousands of years. 

Nay Grimm, the German Antiquary, goes so far as to 
deny that any man Odin ever existed. He proves it by 
etymology. The word Wuotan, which is the original form 
of Odin, a word spread, as name of their chief Divinity, 
over all the Teutonic Nations everywhere; this word, which 
connects itself, according to Grimm, with the Latin vadere, 
with the English wade and suchlike, — means primarily 
Movement, Source of Movement, Power; and is the fit name 
of the highest god, not of any man. The word signifies 
Divinity, he says, among the old Saxon, German and all 
Teutonic Nations; the adjectives formed from it all signify 
divine, supreme, or something pertaining to the chief god. 
Like enough ! We must bow to Grimm in matters etymo- 
logical. Let us consider it fixed that Wuotan means Wad- 
ing, force of Movement. And now still, what hinders it 
from being the name of a Heroic Man and Mover, as well 
as of a god? As for the adjectives, and words formed 
from it, — did not the Spaniards in their universal admira- 
tion for Lope, get into the habit of saying ' a Lope flower, ' 
' a Lope dama, ' if the flower or woman were of surpassing 



r 



24 LECTURES ON HEROES 

beauty ? Had this lasted, Lope would have grown, in Spain, 
to be an adjective signifying godlike also. Indeed, Adam 
Smith, in his Essay on Language, surmises that all adjectives 
whatsoever were formed precisely in that way: some very 
green thing, chiefly notable for its greenness, got the appella- 
tive name Green, and then the next thing remarkable for that 
quality, a tree for instance, was named the green tree, — as 
we still say ' the steam coach, ' ' four-horse coach, ' or the like. 
All primary adjectives, according to Smith, were formed in 
this way ; were at first substantives and things. We cannot 
annihilate a man for etymologies like that! Surely there 
was a First Teacher and Captain; surely there must have 
been an Odin, palpable to the sense at one time; no adjective, 
but a real Hero of flesh and blood ! The voice of all tradi- 
tion, history or echo of history, agrees with all that thought 
will teach one about it, to assure us of this. 

How the man Odin came to be considered a god, the chief 
god? — that surely is a question which nobody would wish to 
dogmatise upon. I have said, his people knew no limits to 
their admiration of him ; they had as yet no scale to measure 
admiration by. Fancy your own generous heart's-love of 
some greatest man expanding till it transcended all bounds, 
till it filled and overflowed the whole field of your thought! 
Or what if this man Odin, — since a great deep soul, with the 
afflatus and mysterious tide of vision and impulse rushing on 
him he knows not whence, is ever an enigma, a kind of terror 
and wonder to himself, — should have felt that perhaps he 
was divine; that he was some effluence of the 'Wuotan/ 
' Movement, ' Supreme Power and Divinity, of whom to his 
rapt vision all Nature was the awful Flame-image; that 
some effluence of Wuotan dwelt here in him! He was not 
necessarily false; he was but mistaken, speaking the truest 
he knew. A great soul, any sincere soul, knows not what he 
is, — alternates between the highest height and the lowest 
depth ; can, of all things, the least measure — Himself ! What 
others take him for, and what he guesses that he may be; 
these two items strangely act on one another, help to deter- 
mine one another. With all men reverently admiring him; 



THE HERO AS DIVINITY 25 

with his own wild soul fullof noble ardours and affections, I 
of whirlwind chaotic darkness and glorious new light; a ' 
divine Universe bursting all into godlike beauty round him, 
and no man to whom the like ever had befallen, what could 
he think himself to be? "Wuotan?" All men answered, 1 
"Wuotan!"— ^ 

And then consider what mere Time will do in such cases; 
how if a man was great while living, he becomes tenfold 
greater when dead. What an enormous camera-ohscura 
magnifier is Tradition! How a thing grows in the human 
Memory, in the human Imagination, when love, worship and 
all that lies in the human Heart, is there to encourage it. 
And in the darkness, in the entire ignorance ; without date or 
document, no book, no Arundel-marble; only here and 
there some dumb monumental cairn. Why, in thirty or 
forty years, were there no books, any great man would grow 
mythic, the contemporaries who had seen him, being once 
all dead. And in three-hundred years, and in three-thou- 
sand years — ! — To attempt theorising on such matters 
would profit little: they are matters which refuse to be 
theoremed and diagramed; which Logic ought to know that 
she cannot speak of. Enough for us to discern, far in the 
uttermost distance, some gleam as of a small real light 
shining in the centre of that enormous camera-obscura 
image; to discern that the centre of it all was not a madness 
and nothing, but a sanity and something. 

This light, kindled in the great dark vortex of the Norse 
mind, dark but living, waiting only for light; this is to me 
the centre of the whole. How such light will then shine 
out, and with wondrous thousandfold expansion spread 
itself, in forms and colours, depends not on it, so much as on 
the National Mind recipient of it. The colours and forms 
of your light will be those of the cut-glass it has to shine 
through. — Curious to think how, for every man, any the 
truest fact is modelled by the nature of the man ! I said. 
The earnest man, speaking to his brother men, must always 
have stated what seemed to him a fact, sl real Appearance 
of Nature. But the way in which such Appearance or fact 



26 LECTURES ON HEROES 

shaped itself, — what sort of fact it became for him, — was 
and is modified by his own laws of thinking; deep, subtle, 
but universal, ever-operating laws. The world of Nature, 
for every man, is the Phantasy of Himself; this world is the 
multiplex ' Image of his own Dream. ' Who knows to what 
unnameable subtleties of spiritual law all these Pagan 
Fables owe their shape ! The number Twelve, divisiblest of 
all, which could be halved, quartered, parted into three, into 
six, the most remarkable number, — this was enough to 
determine the Sigiis of the Zodiac, the number of Odin's 
Sons, and innumerable other Twelves. Any vague rumour 
of number had a tendency to settle itself into Twelve. So 
with regard to every other matter." And quite uncon- 
sciously too, — with no notion of building-up 'Allegories'! 
But the fresh clear glance of those First Ages would he 
prompt in discerning the secret relations of things, and 
wholly open to obey these. Schiller finds in the Cestus of 
Venus an everlasting aesthetic truth as to the nature of all 
Beauty; curious: — but he is careful not to insinuate that 
the old Greek Mythists had any notion of lecturing about 

the ' Philosophy of Criticism ' ! On the whole, we must 

leave those boundless regions. Cannot we conceive that 
Odin was a reality? Error indeed, error enough: but sheer 
falsehood, idle fables, allegory aforethought, — we will not 
believe that our Fathers believed in these. 

Odin's Runes are a significant feature of him. Runes, 
and the miracles of 'magic' he worked by them, make a 
great feature in tradition. Runes are the Scandinavian 
Alphabet; suppose Odin to have been the inventor of Let- 
ters, as well as ' magic, ' among that people ! It is the great- 
est invention man has ever made, this of marking-down the 
unseen thought that is in him by written characters. It 
is a kind of second speech, almost as miraculous as the first. 
You remember the astonishment and incredulity of Ata- 
hualpa the Peruvian King; how he rnade the Spanish 
Soldier who was guarding him scratch Dios on his thumb- 
nail, that he might try the next soldier with it, to ascer- 
tain whether such a miracle was possible. If Odin 



THE HERO AS DIVINITY 27 

brought Letters among his people, he might work magic 
enough ! 

Writing by Runes has some air of being original among 
the Norsemen: not a Phoenician Alphabet, but a native 
Scandinavian one. Snorro tells us farther that Odin in- 
vented Poetry; the music of human speech, as well as that 
miraculous runic marking of it. Transport yourselves into 
the early childhood of nations ; the first beautiful morning- 
light of our Europe, when all yet lay in fresh young radiance 
as of a great sunrise, and our Europe was first beginning to 
think, to be ! Wonder, hope ; infinite radiance of hope and 
wonder, as of a young child's thoughts, in the hearts of these 
strong men ! Strong sons of Nature ; and here was not only 
a wild Captain and Fighter; discerning with his wild flash- 
ing eyes what to do, with his wild lion-heart daring and 
doing it; but a Poet too, all that we mean by a Poet, 
Prophet, great devout Thinker and Inventor, — as the trulv 
Great Man ever is. A Hero is a Hero at all points; in the] 
soul and thought of him first of all. This Odin, in his rude i 
semi-articulate way, had a word to speak. A great heart 
laid open to take in this great Universe, and man's Life 
here, and utter a great word about it. A Hero, as I say, 
in his own rude manner; a wise,' gifted, noble-hearted man. 
And now, if we still admire such a man beyond all others, 
what must these wild Norse souls, first awakened into think- 
ing, have made of him! To them, as yet without names 
for it, he was noble and noblest; Hero, Prophet, God; 
Wuotan, the greatest of all. Thought is Thought, however 
it speak or spell itself. Intrinsically, I conjecture, this Odin 
must have been of the same sort of stuff as the greatest 
kind of men. A great thought in the wild deep heart of 
him! The rough words he articulated, are they not the 
rudimental roots of those English words we still use? He 
worked so, in that obscure element. But he was as a light 
kindled in it; a fight of intellect, rude Nobleness of heart, 
the only kind of lights we have yet ; a Hero, as I say : and 
he had to shine there, and make his obscure element a little 
fighter, — as is still the task of us aU. 



28 LECTURES ON HEROES 

We will fancy him to be the Type Norseman; the finest 
Teuton whom that race had yet produced. The rude Norse 
heart burst-up into boundless admiration round him; into 
adoration. He is as a root of so many great things; the 
fruit of him is found growing, from deep thousands of years, 
over the whole field of Teutonic Life. Our own Wednesday 
as I said, is it not still Odin's Day? Wednesbury, Wans- 
borough, Wanstead, Wandsworth : Odin grew into England 
too, these are still leaves from that root! He was the Chief 
God to all the Teutonic Peoples; their Pattern Norseman; — 
in such way did they admire their Pattern Norseman; that 
was the fortune he had in the world. 

Thus if the man Odin himself have vanished utterly, 
there is this huge Shadow of him which still projects itself 
over the whole History of his People. For this Odin once 
admitted to be God, we can understand well that the whole 
Scandinavian Scheme of Nature, or dim No-scheme, what- 
ever it might before have been, would now begin to develop 
itself altogether differently, and grow thenceforth in a new 
manner. What this Odin saw into, and taught with his 
runes and his rhymes, the whole Teutonic People laid to 
heart and carried forward. His way of thought became 
their way of thought: — such, under new conditions, is the 
history of every great thinker still. In gigantic confused 
lineaments, like some enormous camera-obscura shadow 
thrown upwards from the dead deeps of the Past, and cover- 
ing the whole Northern Heaven, is not that Scandinavian 
Mythology in some sort the Portraiture of this man Odin? 
The gigantic image of his natural face, legible or not legi- 
ble there, expanded and confused in that manner! Ah, 
Thought, I say, is always Thought. No great man lives in 
vain. The History of the world is but the Biography of 
great men. 

To me there is something very touching in this primeval 
figure of Heroism; in such artless, helpless, but hearty 
entire reception of a Hero by his fellow-men. Never so 
helpless in shape, it is the noblest of feelings, and a feeling 
in some shape or other perennial as man himself. If I could 



THE HERO AS DIVINITY 29 

show in any measure, what I feel deeply for a long time now, 
That it is the vital element of manhood, the soul of man's 
history here in our world, — it would be the chief use of this 
discoursing at present. We do not now call our great men 
Gods, nor admire without limit; ah no, with limit enough! 
But if we have no great men, or do not admire at all, — ^that 
were a still worse case. 

This poor Scandinavian Hero-worship, that whole Norse 
way of looking at the Universe, and adjusting oneself there, 
has an indestructible merit for us. A rude childlike way of 
recognising the divineness of Nature, the divineness of Man; 
most rude, yet heartfelt, rubust, giantUke; betokening 
what a giant of a man this child would yet grow to ! — It was 
a truth, and is none. Is it not as the half-dumb stifled voice 
of the long-buried generations of our own Fathers, calling 
out of the depths of ages to us, in whose veins their blood 
still runs: ''This then, this is what we made of the world: 
this is all the image and notion we could form to ourselves 
of this great mystery of a Life and Universe. Despise it 
not. You are raised high above it, to large free scope of 
vision; but you too are not yet at the top. No, your notion 
too, so much enlarged, is but a partial, imperfect one; that 
matter is a thing no man will ever, in time or out of time, 
comprehend; after thousands of years of ever-new expan- 
sion, man will find himself but struggling to comprehend 
again a part of it : the thing is larger than man, not to be 
comprehended by him; an Infinite thing!" 

The essence of the Scandinavian, as indeed of all Pagan 
Mythologies, we found to be recognition of the divineness of 
Nature; sincere communion of man with the mysterious 
invisible Powers visibly seen at work in the world round 
him. This, I should say, is more sincerely done in the Scan- 
dinavian than in any Mythology I know. Sincerity is the 
great characteristic of it. Superior sincerity (far superior) 
consoles us for the total want of old Grecian grace. Sin- 
cerity, I think, is better than grace. I feel that these old 
Northmen were looking into Nature with open eye and soul: 



30 LECTURES ON HEROES 

most earnest, honest; childlike, and yet manlike; with a 
great-hearted simplicity and depth and freshness, in a true, 
loving, admiring, unfearing way. A right valiant, true old 
race of men. Such recognition of Nature one finds to be 
the chief element of Paganism : recognition of Man, and his 
Moral Duty, though this too is not wanting, comes to be the 
chief element only in purer forms of religion. Here, indeed, 
is a great distinction and epoch in Human Beliefs ; a great 
landmark in the religious development of Mankind. Man 
first puts himself in relation with Nature and her Powers, 
wonders and worships over those; not till a later epoch does 
he discern that all Power is Moral, that the grand point is 
the distinction for him of Good and Evil, of Thou shall and 
Thou shall not 

With regard to all these fabulous delineations in the 
Edda, I will remark, moreover, as indeed was already hinted, 
that most probably they must have been of much newer 
date; most probably, even from the first, were comparatively 
idle for the old Norsemen, and as it were a kind of Poetic 
sport. Allegory and Poetic Delineation, as I said above, 
cannot be religious Faith ; the Faith itself must first be there, 
then Allegory enough will gather round it, as the fit body 
round its ^oul. The Norse Faith, I can well suppose, like 
other Faiths, was most active while it lay mainly in the 
silent state, and had not yet much to say about itself, still 
less to sing. 

Among those shadowy Edda matters, amid all that fan- 
tastic congeries of assertions, and traditions, in their musical 
Mythologies, the main practical belief a man could have 
was probably not much more than this : of the Valkyrs and 
the Hall of Odin; of an inflexible Destiny; and that the one 
thing needful for a man was to he brave. The Valkyrs are 
Choosers of the Slain: a Destiny inexorable, which it is 
useless tr)dng to bend or soften, has appointed who is to be 
slain; this was a fundamental point for the Norse believer; 
— as indeed it is for all earnest men everywhere, for a 
Mahomet, a Luther, for a Napoleon too. It lies at the basis 
this for every such man ; it is the woof out of which his whole 



THE HERO AS DIVINITY 31 

system of thought is woven. The Valkyrs; and then that 
these Choosers lead the brave to a heavenly Hall of Odin; 
only the base and slavish being thrust elsewhither, into the 
realms of Hela the Death-goddess : I take this to have been 
the soul of the whole Norse belief. They understood in 
their heart that it was indispensable to be brave; that Odin 
would have no favour for them, but despise and thrust 
them out, if they were not brave. Consider too whether 
there is not something in this! It is an everlasting duty, 
valid in our day as in that, the duty of being brave. Valour 
is still value. The first duty for a man is still that of sub- 
duing Fear. We must get rid of Fear; we cannot act at all 
till then. A man's acts are slavish, not true but specious; 
his very thoughts are false, he thinks too as a slave and 
coward, till he have got Fear under his feet. Odin's creed, 
if we disentangle the real kernel of it, is true to this hour. 
A man shall and must be valiant; he must march forward, 
and quit himself like a man, — trusting imperturbably in the 
appointment and choice of the upper Powers; and, on the 
whole, not fear at all. Now and always, the completeness of 
his victory over Fear will determine how much of a man he is. 
It is doubtless very savage that kind of valour of the old 
Northmen. Snorro tells us they thought it a shame and 
misery not to die in battle; and if natural death seemed to 
be coming on, they would cut wounds in their flesh, that 
Odin might receive them as warriors slain. Old kings, 
about to die, had their body laid into a ship ; the ship sent 
forth, with sails set and slow fire burning it; that, once 
out at sea, it might blaze-up in flame, and in such manner 
bury worthily the old hero, at once in the sky and in the 
ocean ! Wild bloody valour; yet valour of its kind; better, 
I say, than none. In the old Sea-kings too, what an in- 
domitable rugged energy! Silent, with closed lips, as I 
fancy them, unconscious that they were specially brave; 
defying the wild ocean with its monsters, and all men and 
things; — progenitors of our own Blakes and Nelsons! No 
Homer sang these Norse Sea-kings ; but Agamemnon's was 
a small audacity, and of small fruit in the world, to some 



32 LECTURES ON HEROES 

of them; — to Hrolf's of Normandy, for instance! Hrolf, 
or RoUo Duke of Normandy, the wild Sea-king, has a share 
in governing England at this hour. 

Nor was it altogether nothing, even that wild sea-roving 
and battling, through so many generations. It needed to 
' be ascertained which was the strongest kind of men ; who 
were to be ruler over whom. Among the Northland Sover- 
eigns, too, I find some who got the title Wood-cutter; Forest- 
felling Kings. Much lies in that. I suppose at bottom 
many of them were forest-fellers as well as fighters, though 
the Skalds talk mainly of the latter, — misleading certain 
critics not a little ; for no nation of men could ever live by 
fighting alone ; there could not produce enough come out of 
that! I suppose the right good fighter was oftenest also 
the right good forest-feller, — the right good improver, dis- 
cerner, doer and worker in every kind; for true valour, 
different enough from ferocity, is the basis of all. A more 
legitimate kind of valour that; showing itself against the 
untamed Forests and dark brute Powers of Nature, to con- 
quer Nature for us. In the same direction have not we 
their descendants since carried it far? May such valour 
last forever with us ! 

That the man Odin, speaking with a Hero's voice and 
heart, as with an impressiveness out of Heaven, told his 
People the infinite importance of Valour, how man thereby 
became a god; and that his People, feeling a response to it 
in their own hearts, believed this message of his, and thought 
it a message out of Heaven, and him a Divinity for telling 
it them : this seems to me the primary seed-grain of the 
Norse Religion, from which all manner of mythologies, 
symbolic practices, speculations, allegories, songs and sagas 
would naturally grow. Grow, — how strangely! I called 
it a small light shining and shaping in the huge vortex of 
Norse darkness. Yet the darkness itself was alive; con- 
sider that. It was the eager inarticulate uninstructed Mind 
of the whole Norse People, longing only to become articulate, 
to go on articulating ever farther! The living doctrine 
grows, grows; — like a Banyan-tree; the first seed is the 



THE HERO AS DIVINITY 33 

essential thing: any branch strikes itself down into the 
earth, becomes a new root; and so, in endless complexity, 
we have a whole wood, a whole jungle, one seed the parent 
of it all. Was not the whole Norse Religion, accordingly, 
in some sense, what we called ' the enormous shadow of this 
man's likeness'? Critics trace some affinity in some Norse 
mythuses, of the Creation and suchlike, with those of the 
Hindoos. The Cow Adumbla, 'licking the rime from the 
rocks, ' has a kind of Hindoo look. A Hindoo Cow, trans- 
ported into frosty countries. Probably enough; indeed we 
may say undoubtedly, these things will have a kindred with 
the remotest lands, with the earliest times. Thought does 
not die, but only is changed. The first man that began to 
think in this Planet of ours, he was the beginner of all. And 
then the second man, and the third man; — nay, every true 
Thinker to this hour is a kind of Odin, teaches men his way 
of thought, spreads a shadow of his own likeness over sec- 
tions of the History of the World. 

Of the distinctive poetic character or merit of this Norse 
Mythology I have not room to speak; nor does it concern 
us much. Some wild Prophecies we have, as the Voluspa 
in the Elder Edda; of a rapt, earnest, sibylline sort. But 
they were comparatively an idle adjunct of the matter, 
men who as it were but toyed with the matter, these later 
Skalds; and it is their songs chiefly that survive. In later 
centuries, I suppose, they would go on singing, poetically 
symbolising, as our modern Painters paint, when it was no 
longer from the innermost heart, or not from the heart at all. 
This is everywhere to be well kept in mind. 

Gray's fragments of Norse Lore, at any rate, will give one 
no notion of it; — any more than Pope will of Homer. It is 
no square-built gloomy palace of black ashlar marble, 
shrouded in awe and horror, as Gray gives it us: no; 
rough as the North rocks, as the Iceland deserts, it is ; with 
a heartiness, homeliness, even with a tint of good humour 
and robust mirth in the middle of these fearful things. The 
strong old Norse heart did not go upon theatrical sublimities; 
3 



34 LECTURES ON HEROES 

they had not time to tremble. I like much their robust- 
simplicity; their veracity, directness of conception. Thor 
' draws down his brows ' in a veritable Norse rage ; ' grasps 
his hammer till the knuckles grow white. ' Beautiful traits 
of pity too, an honest pity. Balder 'the white God' dies; 
the beautiful, benignant; he is the Sungod. They try all 
Nature for a remedy; but he is dead. Frigga, his mother, 
sends Hermoder to seek or see him: nine days and nine 
nights he rides through gloomy deep valleys, a labyrinth 
of gloom; arrives at the Bridge with its gold roof: the 
Keeper says, " Yes, Balder did pass here; but the Kingdom 
of the Dead is down yonder, far towards the North. " Her- 
moder rides on; leaps Hell-gate, Hela's gate; does see Bal- 
der, and speak with him: Balder cannot be delivered. 
Inexorable ! Hela will not, for Odin or any God, give him 
up. The beautiful and gentle has to remain there. His 
Wife had volunteered to go with him, to die with him. They 
shall forever remain there. He sends his ring to Odin; 
Nanna his wife sends her thimble to Frigga, as a remem- 
brance — Ah me! — 

For indeed Valour is the fountain of Pity too ; — of Truth, 
and all that is great and good in man. The robust homely 
vigour of the Norse heart attaches one much, in these delin- 
eations. Is it not a trait of right honest strength, says 
Uhland, who has written a fine Essay on Thor, that the old 
Norse heart finds its friend in the Thunder-god? That it is 
not frightened away by his thunder; but finds that Summer- 
heat, the beautiful noble summer, must and will have thun- 
der withal ! The Norse heart loves this Thor and his ham- 
mer-bolt; sports with him. Thor is Summer-heat; the 
god of Peaceable Industry as well as Thunder. He is the 
Peasant's friend; his true henchman and attendant is 
Thialfi, Manual Labour. Thor himself engages in all man- 
ner of rough manual work, scorns no business for its plebe- 
ianism; is ever and anon travelling to the country of the 
Jotuns, harrying those chaotic Frost-monsters, subduing 
them, at least straitening and damaging them. There is a 
great broad humour in some of these things. 



THE HERO AS DIVINITY 35 

Thor, as we saw above, goes to Jotun-land, to seek 
Hymir's Caldron, that the Gods may brew beer. Hymir the 
huge Giant enters, his gray beard all full of hoar-frost ; splits 
pillars with the very glance of his eye; Thor, after much 
rough tumult, snatches the Pot, claps it on his head; the 
'handles of it reach down to his heels.' The Norse Skald 
has a kind of loving sport with Thor. This is the Hymir 
whose cattle, the critics have discovered, are Icebergs. Huge 
untutored Brobdignag genius, — needing only to be tamed- 
dowii; into Shakspeares, Darites, Goethes! It is all gone 
now, that old Norse work,^Thor the Thunder-god changed 
into Jack the Giant-killer: but the mind that made it is here 
yet. How strangely things grow, and die, and do not die! 
There are twigs of that great world-tree of Norse Belief still 
curiously traceable. This poor Jack of the Nursery, with 
his miraculous shoes of swiftness, coat of darkness, sword 
of sharpness, he is one. Hynde Etin, and still more decis- 
ively Red Etin of Ireland, in the Scottish Ballads, these are 
both derived from Norseland; Etin is evidently a J'dtun. 
Nay, Shakspeare's Hamlet is a twig too of this same world- 
tref^; there seems no doubt of that. Hamlet, Amleth, I find, 
is really a mystic personage; and his Tragedy, of the 
poisoned Father, poisoned asleep by drops in his ear, and 
the rest, is a Norse mythus! Old Saxo, as his wont was, 
made it a Danish history; Shakspeare, out of Saxo, made 
it what we see. That is a twig of the world-tree that has 
grown, I think; — by nature or accident that one has grown! 

In fact, these old Norse songs have a truth in them, an 
inward perennial truth and greatness, — as, indeed, all must 
have that can very long preserve itself by tradition alone. 
It is a greatness not of mere body and gigantic bulk, but a 
rude greatness of soul. There is a sublime uncomplaining 
melancholy traceable in these old hearts. A great free 
glance into the very deeps of thought. They seem to have 
seen, these brave old Northmen, what Meditation has 
taught all men in all ages, That this world is after all but a 
show, — a phenomenon or appearance, no real thing. All 
deep souls see into that, — the Hindoo Mythologist, the Ger- 



36 LECTURES ON HEROES 

man Philosopher, — the Shakspeare, the earnest Thinker, 
wherever he may be: 

' We are such stuff as Dreams are made of ! ' 

One of Thor's expeditions, to Utgard (the Outer Garden, 
central seat of Jo tun-land), is remarkable in this respect. 
Thialfi was with him, and Loke. After various adventures, 
they entered upon Giant-land; wandered over plains, wild 
uncultivated places, among stones and trees. At nightfall 
they noticed a house ; and as the door, which indeed formed 
one whole side of the house, was open, they entered. It was 
a simple habitation ; one large hall, altogether empty. They 
stayed there. Suddenly in the dead of the night loud noises 
alarmed them. Thor grasped his hammer; stood in the 
door, prepared for fight. His companions within ran hither 
and thither in their terror, seeking some outlet in that rude 
hall; they found a little closet at last, and took refuge there. 
Neither had Thor any battle: for, lo, in the morning it 
turned-out that the noise had been only the snoring of a cer- 
tain enormous but peaceable Giant, the Giant Skrymir, who 
lay peaceably sleeping near by; and this that they took for a 
house was merely his Glove, thrown aside there; the door 
was the Glove- wrist; the little closet they had fled into was 
the Thumb! Such a glove; — I remark too that it had not 
fingers as ours have, but only a thumb, and the rest un- 
divided: a most ancient, rustic glove! 

Skrymir now carried their portmanteau all day; Thor, 
however, had his own suspicions, did not like the ways of 
Skrymir; determined at night to put an end to him as he 
slept. Raising his hammer, he struck down into the Giant's 
face a right thunderbolt blow, of force to rend rocks. The 
Giant merely awoke ; rubbed his cheek, and said. Did a leaf 
fall? Again Thor struck, so soon as Skrymir again slept; 
a better blow than before; but the Giant only murmured, 
Was that a grain of sand? Thor's third stroke was with 
both his hands (the ' knuckles white ' I suppose) , and seemed 
to dint deep into Skrymir's visage; but he merely checked 
his snore and remarked, There must be sparrows roosting 



THE HERO AS DIVINITY 37 

in this tree, I think: what is it that they have dropt? — At 
the gate of Utgard, a place so high that you had to ' strain 
your neck bending back to see the top of it, ' Skrymir went 
his ways. Thor and his companions w^ere admitted; in- 
vited to take share in the games going on. To Thor, for his 
part, they handed a Drinking-horn ; it was a common feat, 
they told him, to drink this dry at one draught. Long and 
fiercely, three times over, Thor drank; but made hardly any 
impression. He was a weak child, they told him : could he 
lift that Cat he saw there? Small as the feat seemed, Thor 
with his whole godlike strength could not; he bent-up the 
creature^s back, could not raise its feet off the ground, could 
at the utmost raise one foot. Why, you are no man, said 
the Utgard people; there is an Old Woman that will wrestle 
you! Thor, heartily ashamed, seized this haggard Old 
Woman; but could not throw her. 

And now, on their quitting Utgard, the chief Jotun, 
escorting them politely a little way, said to Thor: " You are 
beaten then: — yet be not so much ashamed; there was de- 
ception of appearance in it. That Horn you tried to drink 
was the Sea ; you did make it ebb ; but who could drink 
that, the bottomless! The Cat you would have lifted,^ 
why, that is the Midgard-snake, the Great World-Serpent, 
which, tail in mouth, girds and keeps-up the whole created 
world; had you torn that up, the world must have rushed 
to ruin! As for the Old Woman, she was Time, Old Age, 
Duration: with her what can wrestle? No man nor no god 
with her; gods or men, she prevails over all! And then 
those three strokes you struck, — look at these three valleys; 
your three strokes made these!" Thor looked at his 
attendant Jotun: it was Skrymir; — it was, say Norse critics, 
the old chaotic rocky Earth in person, and that glove-house 
was some Earth-cavern! But Skrymir had vanished; Ut- 
gard with its skyhigh gates, when Thor grasped his hammer 
to smite them, had gone to air; only the Giant's voice was 
heard mocking : " Better come no more to Jotunheim ! " — 

This is of the allegoric period, as we see, and half play, 
not of the prophetic and entirely devout: but as a mythus 



38 LECTURES ON HEROES 

is there not real antique Norse gold in it? More true metal, 
rough from the Mimer-stithy, than in many a famed Greek 
Mythus shaped far better ! A great broad Brobdignag grin 
of true humour in this Skrymir ; mirth resting on earnestness 
and sadness, as the rainbow on black tempest : only a right 
valiant heart is capable of that. It is the grim humour of 
our own Ben Jonson, rare old Ben; runs in the blood of us, 
I fancy; for one catches tones of it, under a still other shape, 
out of the American Backwoods. 

That is also a very striking conception that of the Rag- 
narbk, Consummation, or Twilight of the Gods. It is in the 
Voluspa Song; seemingly a very old, prophetic idea. The 
Gods and Jotuns, the divine Powers and the chaotic brute 
ones, after long contest and partial victory by the former, 
meet at last in universal world-embracing wrestle and duel; 
World-serpent against Thor, strength against strength; 
mutually extinctive: and ruin, ' twilight ' sinking into dark- 
ness, swallows the created Universe. The old Universe with 
its Gods is sunk; but it is not final death: there is to be a 
new Heaven and a new Earth ; a higher supreme God, and 
Justice to reign among men. Curious : this law of mutation, 
which also is a law written in man's inmost thought, had 
been deciphered by these earnest old Thinkers in their rude 
style; and how, though all dies, and even gods die, yet all 
death is but a phoenix fire-death, and new-birth into the 
Greater and the Better ! It is the fundamental Law of Be- 
ing for a creature made of Time, living in this Place of Hope. 
All earnest men have seen into it; may still see into it. 

And now, connected with this, let us glance at the last 
mythus of the appearance of Thor; and end there. I fancy 
it to be the latest in date of all these fables; a sorrowing 
protest against the advance of Christianity, — set forth 
reproachfully by some Conservative Pagan. King Olaf has 
been harshly blamed for his over-zeal in introducing Chris- 
tianity ; surely I should have blamed him far more for an 
under-zeal in that ! He paid dear enough for it; he died by 
the revolt of his Pagan people, in battle, in the year 1033, 
at Stickelstad, near that Drontheim, where the chief Cathe- 



THE HERO AS DIVINITY 39 

dral of the North has now stood for many centuries, dedicated 
gratefully to his memory as Saint Olaf . The mythus about 
Thor is to this effect. King Olaf, the Christian Reform 
King, is sailing with fit escort along the shore of Norway, 
from haven to haven; dispensing justice, or doing other 
royal work: on leaving a certain haven, it is found that a 
stranger, of grave eyes and aspect, red beard, of stately 
robust figure, has stept in. The courtiers address him; his 
answers surprise by their pertinency and depth : at length 
he is brought to the King. The stranger's conversation here 
is not less remarkable, as they sail along the beautiful shore; 
but after some time, he addresses King Olaf thus: "Yes, 
King Olaf, it is all beautiful, with the sun shining on it there; 
green, fruitful, a right fair home for you; and many a sore 
day had Thor, many a wild fight with the rock Jotuns, before 
he could make it so. And now you seem minded to put 
away Thor. King Olaf, have a care!" said the stranger, 
drawing-down his brows ; — and when they looked again, he 
was nowhere to be found. — This is the last appearance of 
Thor on the stage of this world ! 

Do we not see well enough -how the Fable might arise, 
without unveracity on the part of any one? It is the way 
most Gods have come to appear among men: thus, if in 
Pindar's time ' Neptune was seen once at the Nemean Games, ' 
what was this Neptune too but a ' stranger of noble grave 
aspect,' — -fit to be 'seen'! There is something pathetic, 
tragic for me in this last voice of Paganism. Thor is van- 
ished, the whole Norse world has vanished; and will not 
return ever again. In like fashion to that pass away the 
highest things. All things that have been in this world, all 
things that are or will be in it, have to vanish : we have our 
sad farewell to give them. 

That Norse Religion, a rude but earnest, sternly impres- 
sive Consecration of Valour (so we may define it) , sufficed for 
these old valiant Northmen. Consecration of Valour is not 
a had thing ! We will take it for good, so far as it goes. 
Neither is there no use in knowing something about this old 
Paganism of our Fathers. Unconsciously, and combined 



40 LECTURES ON HEROES 

with higher things, it is in us yet, that old Faith withal ! To 
know it consciously, brings us into closer and clearer relation 
with the Past, — with our own possessions in the Past. For 
the whole Past, as I keep repeating, is the possession of the 
Present; the Past had always something true, and is a 
precious possession. In a different time, in a different place, 
it is always some other side of our common Human Nature 
that has been developing itself. The actual True is the sum 
of all these; not any one of them by itself constitutes what 
of Human Nature is hitherto developed. Better to know 
them all than misknow them. "To which of these Three 
Religions do you specially adhere?" inquires Meister of his 
Teacher. "To all the Three!" answers the other: "To all 
the Three; for they by their union first constitute the True 
Religion. " 



LECTURE II. 

THE HERO AS PROPHET. MAHOMET: ISLAM. '^- 
[Friday, 8th May 1840.] 

From the first rude times of Paganism among the Scandina- 
vians in the North, we advance to a very different epoch of 
rehgion, among a very different people: Mahometanism 
among the Arabs. A great change; what' a change and 
progress is indicated here, in the universal condition and 
thoughts of men ! 

The Hero is not now regarded as a God among his fellow- 
men; but as one God-inspired, as a Prophet. It is the 
second phasis of Hero-worship : the first or oldest, we may 
say, has passed away without return ; in the history of the 
world there will not again be any man, never so great, whom 
his fellow-men will take for a god. Nay we might rationally 
ask. Did any set of human beings ever really think the man 
they saw there standing beside them a god, the maker of 
this world? Perhaps not: it was usually some man they 
remembered, or had seen. But neither can this any more 
be. The Great Man is not recognised henceforth as a god 
any more. 

It was a rude gross error, that of counting the Great 
Man a god. Yet let us say that it is at all times difficult to 
know what he is, or how to account of him and receive him ! 
The most significant feature in the history of an epoch is 
the manner it has of welcoming a Great Man. Ever, to the 
true instincts of men, there is something godlike in him. 
Whether they shall take him to be a god, to be a prophet, 
or what they shall take him to be? that is ever a grand 
question ; by their way of answering that, we shall see, as 
through a little window, into the very heart of these men's 
spiritual condition. For at bottom the Great Man, as he 

41 



42 LECTURES ON HEROES 

comes from the hand of Nature, is ever the same kind of 
thing: Odin, Luther, Johnson, Burns; I hope to make it 
appear that these are all originally of one stuff; that only 
by the world's reception of them, and the shapes they as- 
sume, are they so immeasurably diverse. The worship of 
Odin astonishes us, — to fall prostrate before the Great Man, 
into deliquium of love and wonder over him, and feel in their 
hearts that he was a denizen of the skies, a god ! This was 
imperfect enough: but to welcome, for example, a Burns 
as we did, was that what we can call perfect? The most 
precious gift that Heaven can give to the Earth; a man of 
' genius ' as we call it ; the Soul of a Man actually sent down 
from the skies with a God's-message to us, — this we waste 
aAvay as an idle artificial firework, sent to amuse us a little, 
and sink it into ashes, wreck and ineff ectuality : such re- 
ception of a Great Man I do not call very perfect either! 
Looking into the heart of the thing, one may perhaps call 
that of Burns a still uglier phenomenon, betokening still 
sadder imperfections in mankind's ways, than the Scandi- 
navian method itself! To fall into mere unreasoning de- 
liquium of love and admiration, was not good; but such 
unreasoning, nay irrational supercilious no-love at all is 
perhaps still worse ! — It is a thing forever changing, this of 
Hero-worship; different in each age, difficult to do well in 
any age. Indeed, the heart of the whole business of the 
age, one may say, is to do it well. 

We have chosen Mahomet not as the most eminent Pro- 
phet ; but as the one we are freest to speak of. He is by no 
means the truest of Prophets; but I do esteem him a true 
one. Farther, as there is no danger of our becoming, any 
of us, Mahometans, I mean to say all the good of him I 
justly can. It is the way to get at his secret : let us try to 
understand what he meant with the world ; what the world 
meant and means with him, will then be a more answerable 
question. Our current hypothesis about Mahomet, that he 
was a scheming Impostor, a Falsehood incarnate, that his 
rehgion is a mere mass of quackery and fatuity, begins 
really to be now untenable to any one. The hes, which well- 



THE HERO AS PROPHET 43 

meaning zeal has heaped round this man, are disgraceful to 
ourselves. only. When Pococke inquired of Grotius, Where 
the proof was of that story of the pigeon, trained to pick 
peas from Mahomet's ear, and pass for an angel dictating 
to him? Grotius answered that there was no proof! It is 
really time to dismiss all t hat w/ The word this man spoke ' " 
has been the life-guidance now of a hundred-and-eighty 
millions of men these twelve-hundred years. These hun- 
dred-and-eighty millions were made by God as well as we. 
"%. greater number of God's creatures believe in Mahomet's 
word at this hour than in any other word whatever. /Are we 
to suppose that it was a miserable piece of spiritual legerde- 
main, this which so many creatures of the Almighty have 
lived by and died by? I, for my part, cannot form any 
such supposition. /I will believe most things sooner than 
that. One would be entirely at a loss what to think of this~ 
world at all, if quackery so grew and were sanctioned here. 

Alas, such theories are very lamentable. If we would^ 
attain to knowledge of anything in God's true Creation, let 
us disbelieve them wholly ! They are the product of an Age 
of Scepticism; they indicate the saddest spiritual paralysis, 
and mere death-life of the souls of men: more godless 
theory, I think, was never promulgated in this Earth. A 
false man found a religion? Why, a false man cannot build 
^ brick house ! If he do nof know and follow truly the 
properties of mortar, burnt clay and what else he works in, 
it is no house that he makes, but a rubbish-heap. It will 
not stand for twelve centuries, to lodge a hundred-and- 
eighty millions ; it will fall straightway. A man must con- 
form himself to Nature's laws, he verily in communion with 
Nature and the truth of things, or Nature will answer him. 
No, not at all ! Speciosities are specious — ah me ! — a 
Cagliostro, many CagHostros, prominent world-leaders, do 
prosper by their quackery, for a day. It is like a forged 
bank-note; they get it passed out of their worthless hands: 
others, not they, have to smart for it. Nature bursts-up in 
fire-flames, French. Re volutions and suchlike, proclaiming 
with terrible veracity that forged notes are forged. 



44 LECTURES ON HEROES 

But of a Great Man especially, of him I will venture to 
assert that it is incredible he should have been other than 
true. It seems to me the primary foundation of him, and 
of all that can lie in him, this. No Mirabeau, Napoleon, 
Burns, Cromwell, no man adequate to do anything, but is 
first of all in right earnest about it; what I call a sincere 
man. I should say sincerity, a deep, great, genuine sin- 
cerity, is the first characteristic of all men in any way 
heroic. Not the sincerity that calls itself sincere; ah no, 
that is a very poor matter indeed; — a shallow braggart 
conscious sincerity; oftenest self-conceit mainly. The 
Great Man's sincerity is of the kind he cannot speak of, is 
not conscious of: nay, I suppose, he is conscious rather of 
msincerity; for what man can walk accurately by the law 
of truth for one day? No, the Great Man does not boast 
himself sincere, far from that; perhaps does not ask him- 
self if he is so: I would say rather, his sincerity does not 
depend on himself; he cannot help being sincere! The 
great Fact of Existence is great to him. Fly as he will; he 
cannot get out of the awful presence of this Reality. His 
mind is so made; he is great by that, first of all. Fearful 
and wonderful, real as Life, real as Death, is this Universe 
to him. Though all men should forget its truth, and walk 
in a vain show, he cannot. At all moments the Flame- 
image glares-in upon him; undeniable, there, there! — I 
wish you to take this as my primary definition of a Great 
Man. A little man may have this, it is competent to all 
men that God has made: but a Great Man cannot be with- 
out it. 

Such a man is what we call an original man; he comes 
to us at first-hand. A messenger he, sent from the Infinite 
Unknown with tidings to us. We may call him Poet, 
Prophet, God; — in one way or other, we all feel that the 
words he utters are as no other man's words. Direct from 
the Inner Fact of things; — he lives, and has to live, in daily 
communion with that. Hearsays cannot hide it from him; 
he is blind, homeless, miserable, following hearsays; it 
glares-in upon him. Really his utterances, are they not a 



THE HERO AS PROPHET 45 

kind of 'revelation;' — what we must call such for want of 
some other name? It is from the heart of the world that he 
comes; he is portion of the primal reality of things. God 
has made many revelations : but this man too, has not God 
made him, the latest and newest of all? The ' inspiration of 
the Almighty giveth him understanding:' we must listen 
before all to him. 

This Mahomet, then, we will in no wise consider as an 
Inanity and Theatricality, a poor conscious ambitious /L^-te- 
schemer; we cannot conceive him so. /The rude message" ' 
he delivered was a real one withal; an earnest confused 
voice from the unknown Deep. The man's words were not 
false, nor his workings here below; no Inanity and Simula- 
crum ; a fiery mass of Life cast-up from the great bosom of 
Nature herself. To kindle the world; the world's Maker 
had ordered it so. Neither can the faults, imperfections, 
insincerities even, of Mahomet, if such were never so well 
proved against him, shake this primary fact about him. 

On the whole, we make too much of faults; the details 
of the business hide the real centre of it. Faults? The - 
greatest of faults, I should say, is to be conscious of none. 
Readers of the Bible above all, one would think, might 
know better. Who is called there 'the man according to 
God's own heart'? David, the Hebrew King, had fallen 
into sins enough; blackest crimes; there was no want of 
sins. And thereupon the unbelievers sneer and ask. Is this 
your man according to God's heart? The sneer, I must 
say, seems to me but a shallow one. What are faults, what 
are the outward details of a life; if the inner secret of it, 
the remorse, temptations, true, often-baffled, never-ended 
struggle of it, be forgotten? ' It is not in man that walketh 
to direct his steps.' Of all acts, is not, for a man, repentance 
the most divine? The deadliest sin, I say, were that same 
supercilious consciousness of no sin; — that is death; the 
heart so conscious is divorced from sincerity, humility and 
fact; is dead : it is ' pure ' as dead dry sand is pure. David's 
life and history, as written for us in those Psalms of his, I 
consider to be the truest emblem ever given of a man's 



46 LECTURES ON HEROES 

moral progress and warfare here below. All earnest souls 
will ever discern in it the faithful struggle of an earnest 
human soul towards what is good and best. Struggle often 
baffled, sore baffled, down as into entire wreck; yet a 
struggle never ended; ever, with tears, repentance, true 
unconquerable purpose, begun anew. Poor human nature ! 
Is not a man's walking, in truth, always that: ' a succession 
of falls ' ? Man can do no other. In this wild element of a 
Life, he has to struggle onwards; now fallen, deep-abased; 
and ever, with tears, repentance, with bleeding heart, he 
has to rise again, struggle again still onwards. That his 
struggle be a faithful unconquerable one: that is the ques- 
tion of questions. We will put-up with many sad details, 
if the soul of it were true. Details by themselves will never 
teach us what it is. I befleve we misestimate Mahomet's 
faults even as faults : but the secret of him will never be got 
by dwelling there. We will leave all this behind us; and 
assuring ourselves that he did mean some true thing, ask 
candidly what it was or might be. 

These Arabs Mahomet was born among are certainly a 
notable people. Their country itself is notable; the fit 
habitation for such a race. Savage inaccessible rock- 
mountains, great grim deserts, alternating with beautiful 
strips of verdure: wherever water is, there is greenness, 
beauty; odoriferous balm-shrubs, date-trees, frankincense- 
trees. Consider that wide waste horizon of sand, empty, 
silent, like a sand-sea, dividing habitable place from habi- 
table. You are all alone there, left alone with the Universe; 
by day a fierce sun blazing down on it with intolerable ra- 
'diance ; by night the great deep Heaven with its stars. Such 
a country is fit for a swift-handed, deep-hearted race of 
men. There is something most agile, active, and yet most 
meditative, enthusiastic in the Arab character. The Per- 
sians are called the French of the East; we will call the 
Arabs Oriental Itahans. A gifted noble people; a people of 
wild strong feelings, and of iron restraint over these: the 
characteristic of noblemindedness, of genius. The wild 



THE HERO AS PROPHET 47 

Bedouin welcomes the stranger to his tent, as one having 
right to all that is there; were it his worst enemy, he will 
slay his foal to treat him, will serve him with sacred hospi- 
tality for three days, will set him fairly on his way; — and 
then, by another law as sacred, kill him if he can. In words 
too, as in action. They are not a loquacious people, taciturn 
rather; but eloquent, gifted when they do speak. An ear- 
nest, truthful kind of men. They are, as we know, of Jew- 
ish kindred; but with that deadly terrible earnestness of 
the Jews they seem to combine something graceful, bril- 
liant, which is not Jewish. They had 'Poetic contests' 
among them before the time of Mahomet. Sale says, at 
Ocadh, in the South of Arabia, there were yearly fairs, and 
there, when the merchandising was done. Poets sang for 
prizes : — the wild people gathered to hear that. 

One Jewish quality these Arabs manifest; the outcome 
of many or of all high qualities : what we may call religiosity. 
From of old they had been zealous worshippers, according 
to their light. They worshipped the stars, as Sabeans; wor- 
shipped many natural objects, — recognised them as sym- 
bols, immediate manifestations, of the Maker of Nature. 
It was wrong; and yet not wholly wrong. All God's works 
are still in a sense symbols of God. Do we not, as I urged, 
still account it a merit to recognise a certain inexhaustible 
significance, 'poetic beauty' as we name it, in all natural 
objects whatsoever? A man is a poet, and honoured, for 
doing that, and speaking or singing it, — a kind of diluted 
worship. They had many Prophets, these Arabs; Teachers 
each to his tribe, each according to the light he had. But 
indeed, have we not from of old the noblest of proofs, still 
palpable to every one of us, of what devoutness and noble- 
mindedness had dwelt in these rustic thoughtful peoples? 
Biblical critics seem agreed that our own Book of Job was 
written in that region of the world. I call that, apart from 
all theories about it, one of the grandest things ever written 
with pen. One feels, indeed, as if it were not Hebrew; such 
a noble universality, different from noble patriotism or 
sectarianism, reigns in it. A noble Book; all men's Book! 



48 LECTURES ON HEROES 

It is our first, oldest statement of the never-ending Prob- 
lem, — man's destiny, and God's ways with him here in this 
earth. And in all such free flowing outlines; grand in its 
sincerity, in its simplicity ; in its epic melody, and repose of 
reconcilement. There is the seeing eye, the mildly under- 
standing heart. So true everyway; true eyesight and 
vision for all things ; material things no less than spiritual : 
the Horse, — ' hast thou clothed his neck with thunder f ' — 
he ' laughs at the shaking of the spear ! ' Such living like- 
nesses were never since drawn. SubHme sorrow, sublime 
reconcihation ; oldest choral melody as of the heart of man- 
kind ; — so soft, and great ; as the summer midnight, as the 
world with its seas and stars ! There is nothing written, I 
think, in the Bible or out of it, of equal literary merit. — 

To the idolatrous Arabs one of the most ancient univer- 
sal objects of worship was that Black Stone, still kept in the 
building called Caabah at Mecca. Diodorus Siculus men- 
tions this CaabaTTinaway not to be mistaken, as the oldest, 
most honoured temple in his time; that is, some half-cen- 
tury before our Era. Silvestre de Sacysays there is some 
likelihood that the Black Stone is an aeroHte. In that case, 
some man might see it fall out of Heaven ! It stands now 
beside the Well Zemzem ; the Caabah is built over both. A 
Well is in all places a beautiful affecting object, gushing out 
like Hfe from the hard earth; — still more so in those hot 
dry countries, where it is the first condition of being. The 
Well Zemzem has its name from the bubbling sound of the 
waters, zem-zem; they think it is the Well which Hagar 
found with her little Ishmael in the wilderness : the aerolite 
and it have been sacred now, and had a Caabah over them, 
for thousands of years.- A curious object, that Caabah! 
There it stands at this hour, in the black cloth-covering the 
Sultan sends it yearly; 'twenty-seven cubits high;' with 
circuit, with double circuit of pillars, with festoon-rows of 
lamps and quaint ornaments: the lamps will be lighted 
again this night, — to glitter again under the stars. An 
authentic fragment of the oldest Past. It is the Keblah of 
all Moslem : from Delhi all onwards to Morocco, the eyes of 



THE HERO AS PROPHET 49 

innumerable praying men are turned towards it, five times, 
this day and all days: one of the notablest centres in the 
Habitation of Men. 

It had been from the sacredness attached to this Caabah 
Stone and Hagar's Well, from the pilgrimings of all tribes of 
Arabs hither, that Mecca took its rise as a Town. A great 
town once, though much decayed now. It has no natural 
advantage for a town ; stands in a sandy hollow amid bare 
barren hills, at a distance from the sea; its provisions, its 
very bread, have to be imported. But so many pilgrims 
needed lodgings : and then all places of pilgrimage do, from 
the first, become places of trade, ^^he first day pilgrims 
meet, merchants have also met : where men see themselves 
assembled for one object, they find that they can accom- 
plish other objects which depend on meeting together. 
Mecca became the Fair of all Arabia. And thereby indeed 
the chief staple and warehouse of whatever Commerce there 
was between the Indian and the Western countries, Syria, 
Egypt, even Italy. It had at one time a population of 
100,000; buyers, forwarders of those Eastern and Western 
products; importers for their own behoof of proAdsions and 
corn. The government w^as a kind of irregular aristocratic 
republic, not without a touch of theocracy. Ten Men of a 
chief tribe, chosen in some rough way, were Governors of 
Mecca, and Keepers of the Caabah. The Koreish were the 
chief tribe in Mahomet's time; his own family was of that 
tribe. The rest of the Nation, fractioned and cut-asunder 
by deserts, lived under similar rude patriarchal govern- 
ments by one or several: herdsmen, carriers, traders, gen- 
erally robbers too ; being of tenest at war one with another, 
or with all: held together by no open bond, if it were not 
this meeting at the Caabah, where all forms of Arab Idolatry 
assembled in common adoration ; — held mainly by the in- 
ward indissoluble bond of a common blood and language. 
In this way had the Arabs lived for long ages, unnoticed by 
the world; a people of great qualities, unconsciously wait- 
ing for the day when they should become notable to all the 
world. Their Idolatries appear to have been in a tottering 
4 



50 LECTURES ON HEROES 

state; much was getting into confusion and fermentation 
among them. Obscure tidings of the most important Event 
ever transacted in this world, the Life and Death of the 
Divine Man in Judea, at once the symptom and cause of 
immeasurable change to all people in the world, had in the 
course of centuries reached into Arabia too ; and could not 
but, of itself, have produced fermentation there. 



> 



It was among this Arab people, so circumstanced, in the 
year 570 of our Era, that the man Mahomet was born. He 
was of the family of Hashem, of the Koreish tribe as we said; 
though poor, connected with the chief persons of his coun- 
try. Almost at his birth he lost his Father; at the age of 
six years his Mother too, a woman noted for her beauty, her 
worth and sense: he fell to the charge of his Grandfather, 
an old man, a hundred years old. A good old man: Ma- 
homet's Father, Abdallah, had been his youngest favourite 
son. He saw in Mahomet, with his old life-worn eyes, a 
century old, the lost Abdallah come back again, all that 
was left of Abdallah. He loved the little orphan Boy greatly ; 
used to say. They must take care of that beautiful little 
Boy, nothing in their kindred was more precious than he. 
At his death, while the boy was still but two- years old, he 
left him in charge to Abu Thaleb the eldest of the Uncles, 
as to him that now was head of the house. By this Uncle, 
a just and rational man as everything betokens, Mahomet 
was brought-up in the best Arab way. 

Mahomet, as he grew up, accompanied his Uncle on 
trading journeys and suchUke; in his eighteenth year one 
finds him a fighter following his Uncle in war. But per- 
haps the most significant of all his journeys is one we find 
noted as of some years' earlier date: a journey to the Fairs 
of Syria. The young man here first came in contact with a 
quite foreign world, — with one foreign element of endless 
moment to him: the Christian Religion. I know not what 
to make of that ' Sergius, the Nestorian Monk,' whom Abu 
Thaleb and he are said to have lodged with ; or how much 
any monk could have taught one still so young. Probably 



THE HERO AS PROPHET 51 

enough it is greatly exaggerated, this of the Nestorian 
Monk. Mahomet was only fourteen; had no language but 
his own: much in Syria must have been a strange unin- 
telHgible whirlpool to him. But the eyes of the lad were 
open; glimpses of many things would doubtless be taken- 
in, and lie very enigmatic as yet, which were to ripen in a 
strange way into views, into beliefs and insights one day. 
These journeys to Syria were probably the beginning of 
much to Mahomet. 

One other circumstance we must not forget: that he 
had no school-learning; of the thing we call school-learning 
none at all. The art of writing was but just introduced 
into Arabia ; it seems to be the true opinion that Mahomet 
never could write ! life in the Desert, with its experiences, 
was all his education. What of this infinite Universe he, 
from his dim place, with his own eyes and thoughts, could 
take in, so much and no more of it was he to know. Curi- 
ous, if we will reflect on it, this of having no books. Except 
by what he could see for himself, or hear of by uncertain 
rumour of speech in the obscure Arabian Desert, he could 
know nothing. The wisdom that had been before him or at 
a distance from him in the w^orld, was in a manner as good 
as not there for him. Of the great brother souls, flame- 
beacons through so many lands and times, no one directly 
communicates with this great soul. He is alone there, 
deep down in the bosom of the Wilderness ; has to grow up 
so, — alone with Nature and his own Thoughts. 

But, from an early age, he had been remarked as a 
thoughtful man. His companions named him ' Al Amin, 
The Faithful.' A man of truth and fidelity; true in what 
he did, in what he spake and thought. They noted that he 
always meant something. A man rather taciturn in speech; 
silent when there was nothing to be said ; but pertinent, wise, 
sincere, when he did speak; always throwing light on the 
matter. This is the only sort of speech worth speaking! 
Through life we find him to have been regarded as an alto- 
gether solid, brotherly, genuine man. A serious, sincere 
character; yet amiable, cordial, companionable, jocose 



52 LECTURES ON HEROES 

even; — a good laugh in him withal: there are men whose 
laugh is as untrue as anything about them; who cannot 
laugh. One hears of Mahomet's beauty: his fine sagacious 
honest face^ brown florid complexion, beaming black eyes; 
— I somehow like too that vein on the brow, which swelled- 
up black when he was in anger : like the ' horse-shoe vein ' 
in Scott's Redgauntlet. It was a kind of feature in t^ie 
Hashem family, this black swelling vein in the brow; Ma- 
homet had it prominent, as would appear. A spontaneous, 
passionate, yet just, true-meaning man! Full of wild fac- 
ulty, fire and light; of wild worth, all uncultured; working 
out his life-task in the depths of the Desert there. 

How he was placed with Kadi j ah, a rich Widow, as her 
Steward, and travelled in her business, again to the Fairs 
of Syria ; how he managed all, as one can well understand, 
with fidehty, adroitness ; how her gratitude, her regard for 
him grew : the story of their marriage is altogether a grace- 
ful intelligible one, as told us by the Arab authors. He was 
twenty-five; she forty, though still beautiful. He seems to 
have lived in a most affectionate, peaceable, wholesome 
way with this wedded benefactress ; loving her truly, and 
her alone. It goes greatly against the impostor theory, the 
fact that he lived in this entirely unexceptionable, entirely 
quiet and commonplace way, till the heat of his years was 
done. He was forty before he talked of any mission from 
Heaven. All his irregularities, real and supposed, date 
from after his fiftieth year, when the good Kadijah died. 
All his 'ambition, ' seemingly, had been, hitherto, to live an 
honest life ; his ' fame,' the mere good opinion of neighbours 
that knew him, had been sufficient hitherto. Not till he 
was already getting old, the prurient heat of his life all burnt 
out, and -peace growing to be the chief thing this world 
could give him, did he start on the 'career of ambition;' 
and, belying all his past character and existence, set-up as a 
wretched empty charlatan to acquire what he could now no 
longer en j oy ! For my share, I have no faith whatever in that. 

Ah no: this deep-hearted Son of the Wilderness, with 
his beaming black eyes and open social deep soul, had other 



THE HERO AS PROPHET 53 

thoughts in him than ambition. A silent great soul; he 
was one of those who cannot hut be in earnest; whom Na- 
ture herself has appointed to be sincere. While others walk 
in formulas and hearsays, contented enough to dwell there, 
this man could not screen himself in formulas; he was 
alone with his own soul and the reality of things. The 
great Mystery of Existence, as I said, glared-in upon him, 
with its terrors, with its splendours ; no hearsays could hide 
that unspeakable fact, "Here am I!" Such sincerity, as we 
named it, has in very truth something of divine. The word 
of such a man is a Voice direct from Nature's own Heart. 
Men do and must listen to that as to nothing else ; — all else 
is wind in comparison. From of old, a thousand thoughts, 
in his pilgrimings and wanderings, had been in this man: 
What am I? What is this unfathomable Thing I live in, 
which men name Universe? What is Life; what is Death? 
What am I to believe? What am I to do? The grim rocks 
of Mount Hara, of Mount Sinai, the stern sandy solitudes 
answered not. The great Heaven rolling silent overhead, 
with its blue-glancing stars, answered not. There was no 
answer. The man's own soul, and what of God's inspira- 
tion dwelt there, had to answer ! 

It is the thing which all men have to ask themselves; 
which we too have to ask, and answer. This wild man felt it 
to be of infinite moment ; all other things of no moment what- 
ever in comparison. The jargon of argumentative Greek 
Sects, vague traditions of Jews, the stupid routine of Arab 
Idolatry: there was no answer in these. A Hero, as I re- 
peat, has this first distinction, which indeed we may call 
first and last, the Alpha and Omega of his whole Heroism, 
That he looks through the shows of things into things. Use 
and wont, respectable hearsay, respectable formula: all 
these are good, or are not good. There is something be- 
hind and beyond all these, which all these must correspond 
with, be the image of, or they are — Idolatries; ^ bits of black 
wood pretending to be God;' to the earnest soul a mockery 
and abomination. Idolatries never so gilded, waited on by 
heads of the Koreish, will do nothing for this man. Though 



54 LECTURES ON HEROES 

all men walk by them, what good is it? The great Reality 
stands glaring there upon him. He there has to answer it, 
or perish miserably. Now, even now, or else through all 
Eternity never! Answer it; thou must find an answer. — 
Ambition? What could all Arabia do for this man; with 
the crown of Greek Heraclius, of Persian Chosroes, and all 
crowns in the Earth; — what could they all do for him? It 
was not of the Earth he wanted to hear tell; it was of the 
Heaven above and of the Hell beneath. All crowns and 
sovereignties whatsoever, where would they in a few brief 
years be? To be Sheik of Mecca or Arabia, and have a bit 
of gilt wood put into your hand, — will that be one's salva- 
tion? I decidedly think, not. We will leave it altogether, 
this impostor hypothesis, as not credible; not very toler- 
able even, worthy chiefly of dismissal by us. 

Mahomet had been wont to retire yearly, during the 
month Ramadhan, into solitude and silence; as indeed 
was the Arab custom; a praiseworthy custom, which such 
a man, above all, would find natural and useful. Com- 
muning with his own heart, in the silence of the mountains ; 
himself silent; open to the 'small still voices:' it was a 
right natural custom! Mahomet was in his fortieth year, 
when having withdrawn to a cavern in Mount Hara, near 
Mecca, during this Ramadhan, to pass the month in prayer, 
and meditation on those great questions, he one day told 
his wife Kadi j ah, who with his household was with him or 
near him this year. That by the unspeakable special favour 
of Heaven he had now found it all out; was in doubt and 
darkness no longer, but saw it all. That all these Idols and 
Formulas were nothing, miserable bits of wood; that there 
was One God in and over all; and we must leave all Idols, 
and look to Him. That God is great; and that there is no- 
thing else great! He is the Reality. Wooden Idols are not 
real; He is real. He made us at first, sustains us yet; we 
and all things are but the shadow of Him; a transitory gar- 
ment veiling the Eternal Splendour. ' Allah akhar, God is 
great;' — and then also 'Islam,' That we must svhmit to 
God. That our whole strength 'lies in resigned submission 



THE HERO AS PROPHET 55 

to Him, whatsoever He do to us. For this world, and for 
the other! The thing he sends to us, were it death and 
worse than death, shall be good, shall be best; we resign 
ourselves to God. — ' If this be Islam' says Goethe, ' do we 
not all live in Islam ? ' Yes, all of us that have any moral 
life ; we all live so. It has ever been held the highest wisdom 
for a man not merely to submit to Necessity, — Necessity 
will make him submit, — ^but to know and believe well that 
the stern thing which Necessity had ordered was the wisest, 
the best, the thing wanted there. To cease his frantic pre- 
tension of scanning this great God's-World in his small 
fraction of a brain; to know that it had verily, though 
deep beyond his soundings, a Just Law, that the soul of it 
was Good; — that his part in it was to conform to the Law 
of the Whole, and in devout silence follow that; not ques- 
tioning it, obeying it as unquestionable. 

I say, this is yet the only true morality known. A man 
is right and invincible, virtuous and on the road towards 
sure conquest, precisely while he joins himself to the great 
deep Law of the World, in spite of all superficial laws, tem- 
porary appearances, profit-and-loss calculations; he is vic- 
torious while he codperates with that great central Law, 
not victorious otherwise: — and surely his first chance of 
cooperating with it, or getting into the course of it, is to 
know with his whole soul that it is; that it is good, and 
alone good! This is the soul of Islam; it is properly the 
soul of Christianity; — for Islam is definable as a confused 
form of Christianity; had Christianity not been, neither 
had it been. Christianity also commands us, before all, to 
be resigned to God. We are to take no counsel with flesh- 
and-blood; give ear to no vain cavils, vain sorrows and 
wishes: to know that we know nothing; that the worst 
and cruelest to our eyes is not what it seems ; that we have 
to receive whatsoever befalls us as sent from God above, 
and say. It is good and wise, God is great! "Though He 
slay me, yet will I trust in Him." Islam means in its way 
Denial of Self, Annihilation of Self. This is yet the highest 
Wisdom that Heaven has revealed to our Earth. 



56 LECTURES ON HEROES 

Such light had come, as it could, to illuminate the dark- 
ness of this wild Arab soul. A confused dazzling splendour 
as of life and Heaven, in the great darkness which threat- 
ened to be death: he called it revelation and the angel 
Gabriel ; — who of us yet can know what to call it? It is the 
' inspiration of the Almighty ' that giveth us understanding. 
To know; to get into the truth of anything, is ever a mystic 
act, — of which the best Logics can but babble on the sur- 
face. 'Is not Belief the true god-announcing Miracle?' 
sa3^s Novalis. — That Mahomet's whole soul, set in flame 
with this grand Truth vouchsafed him, should feel as if it 
were important and the only important thing, was very 
natural. That Providence had unspeakably honoured him 
by revealing it, saving him from death and darkness; that 
he therefore was bound to make known the same to all 
creatures: this is what was meant by 'Mahomet is the 
Prophet of God ; ' this too is not without its true meaning. — 

The good Kadi j ah, we can fancy, listened to him with 
wonder, with doubt: at length she answered: Yes, it was 
true this that he said. One can fancy too the boundless 
gratitude of Mahomet; and how of all the kindnesses she 
had done him, this of believing the earnest struggling word 
he now spoke was the greatest. ' It is certain, ' says No- 
valis, ' my Conviction gains infinitely, the moment another 
soul will believe in it.' It is a boundless favour. — He never 
forgot this good Kadijah. Long afterwards, Ayesha his 
young favourite wife, a woman who indeed distinguished 
herself among the Moslem, by all manner of qualities, 
through her whole long life; this young brilliant Ayesha 
was, one day, questioning him : " Now am not I better than 
Kadijah? She was a widow; old, and had lost her looks: 
you love me better than you did her? " — " No, by Allah ! " 
answered Mahomet: "No, by Allah! She believed in me 
when none else would believe. In the whole world I had 
but one friend, and she was that!" — Seid, his Slave, also 
believed in him; these with his young Cousin Ali, Abu 
Thaleb's son, were his first converts. 

He spoke of his Doctrine to this man and that; but the 



THE HERO AS PROPHET 57 

most treated it with ridicule, with indifference; in three 
years, I think, he had gained but thirteen followers. His 
progress was slow enough. His encouragement to go on, 
was altogether the usual encouragement that such a man 
in such a case meets. After some three years of small suc- 
cess, he invited forty of his chief kindred to an entertain- 
ment; and there stood-up and told them what his preten- 
sion was: that he had this thing to promulgate abroad to 
all men; that it was the highest thing, the one thing: 
which of them would second him in that? Amid the doubt 
and silence of all, young Ali, as yet a lad of sixteen, impa- 
tient of the silence, started-up, and exclaimed in passionate 
fierce language, That he would! The assembly, among 
whom was Abu Thaleb, Ali^s Father, could not be un- 
friendly to Mahomet; yet the sight there, of one unlettered 
elderly man, with a lad of sixteen, deciding on such an en- 
terprise against all mankind, appeared ridiculous to them; 
the assembly broke-up in laughter. Nevertheless it proved 
not a laughable thing ; it was a very serious thing ! As for 
this young Ali, one cannot but like him. A noble-minded 
creature, as he shows himself, now and always afterwards; 
full of affection, of fiery daring. Something chivalrous in 
him ; brave as a lion ; yet with a grace, a truth and affection 
worthy of Christian knighthood. He died by assassination 
in the Mosque at Bagdad; a death occasioned by his own 
generous fairness, confidence in the fairness of others: he 
said. If the wound proved not unto death, they must par- 
don the Assassin; but if it did, then they must slay him 
straightway, that so they two in the same hour might ap- 
pear before God, and see which side of that quarrel was 
the just one ! 

Mahomet naturally gave offence to the Koreish, Keepers 
of the Caabah, superintendents of the Idols. One or two 
men of influence had joined him : the thing spread slowly, 
but it was spreading. Naturally he gave offence to every- 
body: Who is this that pretends to be wiser than we all; 
that rebukes us all, as mere fools and worshippers of wood ! 
Abu Thaleb the good Uncle spoke with him : Could he not 



58 LECTURES ON HEROES 

be silent about all that; believe it all for himself, and not 
trouble others, anger the chief men, endanger himself and 
them all, talking of it? Mahomet answered: If the Sun 
stood on his right hand and the Moon on his left, ordering 
him to hold his peace, he could not obey ! No : there was 
something in this Truth he had got which was of Nature 
herself; equal in rank to Sun, or Moon, or whatsoever thing 
Nature had made. It would speak itself there, so long as 
the Almighty allowed it, in spite of Sun and Moon, and all 
Koreish and all men and things. It must do that, and 
could do no other. , Mahomet answered so ; and, they say, 
'burst into tears.' Burst into tears: he felt that Abu 
Thaleb was good to him; that the task he had got was no 
soft, but a stern and great, one. 

He went on speaking to who would hsten to him; pub- 
Hshing his Doctrine among the pilgrims as they came to 
Mecca ; gaining adherents in this place and that. Continual 
contradiction, hatred, open or secret danger attended him. 
His powerful relations protected Mahomet himself; but by 
and by, on his own advice, all his adherents had to quit 
Mecca, and seek refuge in Abyssinia over the sea. The 
Koreish grew ever angrier; laid plots, and swore oaths 
among them, to put Mahomet to death with their own 
hands. Abu Thaleb was dead, the good Kadijah was dead. 
Mahomet is not soHcitous of sympathy from us; but his 
outlook at this time was one of the dismalest. He had to 
hide in caverns, escape in disguise; fly hither and thither; 
homeless, in continual peril of his life. More than once it 
seemed all-over with him; more than once it turned on a 
straw, some rider's horse taking fright or the like, whether 
Mahomet and his Doctrine had not ended there, and not 
been heard of at all. But it was not to end so. 

In the thirteenth year of his mission, finding his enemies 
all banded against him, forty sworn men, one out of every 
tribe, waiting to take his life, and no continuance possible 
at Mecca for him any longer, Mahomet fled to the place then 
called Yathreb, where he had gained some adherents; the 
place they now call Medina, or ' Medinat al Nabi, the City 



THE HERO AS PROPHET 59 

of the Prophet/ from that circumstance. It lay some 200 
miles off, through rocks and deserts; not without great 
difficulty, in such mood as we may fancy, he escaped 
thither, and found welcome. The whole East dates its era 
from this Flight, Hegira as they name it : the Year 1 of this 
Hegira is 622 of our Era, the fifty-third of Mahomet's life. 
He was now becoming an old man; his friends sinking 
round him one by one; his path desolate, encompassed 
with danger: unless he could find hope in his own heart, 
the outward face of things was but hopeless for him. It is 
so with all men in the like case. Hitherto Mahomet had 
professed to publish his Religion by the way of preaching 
and persuasion alone. But now, driven foully out of his 
native country, since unjust men had not only given no ear 
to his earnest Heaven's-message, the deep cry of his heart, 
but would not even let him live if he kept speaking it, — ^the 
wild Son of the Desert resolved to defend himself, like a 
man and Arab. If the Koreish will have it so, they shall 
have it. Tidings, felt to be of infinite moment to them and 
all men, they would not listen to these; would trample 
them down by sheer violence, steel and murder; well, let 
steel try it then ! Ten years more this Mahomet had ; all of 
fighting, of breathless impetuous toil and struggle; with 
what result we know. 

Much has been said of Mahomet's propagating his Re- 
ligion by the sword. It is no doubt far nobler what we have 
to boast of the Christian Religion, that it propagated itself 
peaceably in the way of preaching and conviction. Yet 
withal, if we take this for an argument of the truth or false- 
hood of a religion, there is a radical mistake in it. The 
sword indeed : but where will you get your sword ! Every 
new opinion, as its starting, is precisely in a minority of one. 
In one man's head alone, there it dwells as yet. One man 
alone of the whole world believes it; there is one man 
against all men. That he take a sword, and try to propa- 
gate with that, will do little for him. You must first get 
your sword ! On the whole, a thing will propagate itself as 
it can. We do not find, of the Christian Religion either, 



4 



60 LECTURES ON HEROES 

that it always disdained the sword, when once it had got 
one. Charlemagne's conversion of the Saxons was not by 
preaching. I care little about the sword: I will allow a 
thing to struggle for itself in this world, with any sword or 
tongue or implement it has, or can lay hold of. We will let 
it preach, and pamphleteer, and fight, and to the utter- 
most bestir itself, and do, beak and claws, whatsoever is in 
it; very sure that it will, in the long-run, conquer nothing 
which does not deserve to be conquered. What is bet- 
ter than itself, it cannot put away, but only what is worse. 
In this great Duel, Nature herself is umpire, and can do no 
wrong: the thing which is deepest-rooted in Nature, what 
we call truest, that thing and not the other will be found 
growing at last. 

Here however, in reference to much that there is in Ma- 
homet and his success, we are to remember what an umpire 
Nature is; what a greatness, composure of depth and tol- 
erance there is in her. You take wheat to cast into the 
Earth's bosom: your wheat may be mixed with chaff, 
chopped straw, barn-sweepings, dust and all imaginable 
rubbish; no matter, you cast it into the kind just Earth; 
she grows the wheat, — the whole rubbish she silently 
absorbs, shrouds it in, says nothing of the rubbish. The 
yellow wheat is growing there; the good Earth is silent 
about all the rest, — has silently turned all the rest to some 
benefit too, and makes no complaint about it! So every- 
where in Nature! She is true and not a lie; and yet so 
great, and just, and motherly in her truth. She requires of 
a thing only that it be genuine of heart; she will protect it 
if so ; will not, if not so. There is a soul of truth in all the 
things she ever gave harbour to. Alas, is not this the his- 
tory of all highest Truth that comes or ever came into the 
world? The body of them all is imperfection, an element of 
light in darkness: to us they have to come embodied in 
mere Logic, in some merely scientific Theorem of the Uni- 
verse; which cannot be complete; which cannot but be 
found, one day, incomplete, erroneous, and so die and dis- 
appear. The body of all Truth dies ; and yet in all, I say, 



THE HERO AS PROPHET 61 

there is a soul which never dies; which in new and ever- 
nobler embodiment lives immortal as man himself! It is 
the way with Nature. The genuine essence of Truth never 
dies. That it be genuine, a voice from the great Deep of 
Nature, there is the point at Nature's judgment-seat. 
What we call pure or impure, is not with her the final ques- 
tion. Not how much chaff is in you; but whether you have 
any wheat. Pure? I might say to many a man: Yes, you 
are pure; pure enough; but you are chaff, — insincere 
hypothesis, hearsay, formality; you never were in contact 
with the great heart of the Universe at all; you are properly 
neither pure nor impure; you are nothing, Nature has no 
business with you. 

Mahomet's creed we called a kind of Christianitj^* and 
really, if we look at the wild rapt earnestness with which it 
was believed and laid to heart, I should say a better kind 
than that of those miserable Syrian Sects, with their vain 
j anglings about Homoiousion and Homoousion, the head 
full of worthless noise, the heart empty and dead! The 
truth of it is embedded in portentous error and falsehood; 
but the truth of it makes it be believed, not the falsehood : 
it succeeded by its truth. A bastard kind of Christianity, 
but a living kind ; with a heart-life in it ; not dead, chopping 
barren logic merely ! Out of all that rubbish of Arab idola- 
tries, argumentative theologies, traditions, subtleties, ru- 
mours and hypotheses of Greeks and Jews, with their idle 
wiredrawings, this wild man of the Desert, with his wild 
sincere heart, earnest as death and life, with his great flash- 
ing natural eyesight, had seen into the kernel of the matter. 
Idolatry is nothing: these Wooden Idols of yours, 'ye rub 
them with oil and wax, and the flies stick on them,' — these 
are wood, I tell you! They can do nothing for you; they 
are an impotent blasphemous pretence; a horror and 
abomination, if ye knew them. God alone is; God alone 
has power; He made us. He can kill us and keep us alive: 
' Allah akbar, God is great.' Understand that His will is the 
best for you; that howsoever sore to flesh-and-blood, you 
will find it the wisest, best : you are bound to take it so ; in 



62 LECTURES ON HEROES 

this world and in the next, you have no other thing that 
you can do ! 

And now if the wild idolatrous men did believe this, and 
with their fiery hearts lay "hold of it to do it, in what form 
soever it came to them, I say it was well worthy of being 
believed. In one form or the other, I say it is still the one 
thing worthy of being believed by all men. Man does 
hereby become the high-priest of this Temple of a World. 
He is in harmony with the Decrees of the Author of this 
World; cooperating with them, not vainly withstanding 
them: I know, to this day, no better definition of Duty 
than that same. All that is right includes itself in this of 
cooperating with the real Tendency of the World: you 
succeed by this (the World's Tendency will succeed), you 
are good, and in the right course there. Homoiousion, Ho- 
moousion, vain logical jangle, then or before or at any time, 
may jangle itself out, and go whither and how it likes: this 
is the thing it all struggles to mean, if it would mean any- 
thing. If it do not succeed in meaning this, it means noth- 
ing. Not that Abstractions, logical Propositions, be cor- 
rectly worded or incorrectly; but that living concrete Sons 
of Adam do lay this to heart: that is the important point. 
Islam devoured all these vain jangling Sects; and I think 
had right to do so. It was a Reality, direct from the great 
Heart of Nature once more. Arab idolatries, Syrian for- 
mulas, whatsoever was not equally real, had to go up in 
flame, — mere dead fuel, in various senses, for this which 
was fire. 

It was during these wild warfarings and strugglings, 
especially after the Flight to Mecca, that Mahomet dictated 
at intervals his Sacred Book, which they name Koran, or 
Reading, 'Thing to be read.' This is the Work he and his 
disciples made so much of, asking all the world. Is not that 
a miracle? The Mahometans regard their Koran with a 
reverence which few Christians pay even to their Bible. It 
is admitted everywhere as the standard of all law and all 
practice; the thing to be gone-upon in speculation and life: 



THE HERO AS PROPHET 63 

the message sent direct out of Heaven, which this Earth has 
to conform to, and walk by; the thing to be read. Their 
Judges decide by it ; all Moslem are bound to study it, seek 
in it for the light of their life. They have mosques where it 
is all read daily; thirty relays of priests take it up in suc- 
cession, get through the whole each day. There, for twelve- 
hundred years, has the voice of this Book, at all moments, 
kept sounding through the ears and the hearts of so many 
men. We hear of Mahometan Doctors that had read it 
seventy-thousand times ! 

Very curious: if one sought for 'discrepancies of na- 
tional taste,' here surely were the most eminent instance of 
that ! We also can read the Koran ; our Translation of it, 
by Sale, is known to be a very fair one. I must say, it is as 
toilsome reading as I ever undertook. A wearisome con- 
fused jumble, crude, incondite; endless iterations, long- 
windedness, entanglement; most crude, incondite; — ^in- 
supportable stupidity, in short ! Nothing but a sense of duty 
could carry any European through the Koran. We read in 
it, as we might in the State-Paper office, unreadable masses 
of lumber, that perhaps we may get some glimpses of a 
remarkable man. It is true we have it under disadvan- 
tages : the Arabs see more method in it than we. Mahomet's 
followers found the Koran lying all in fractions, as it had 
been written-down at first promulgation; much of it, they 
say, on shoulder-blades of mutton, flung pellmell into a 
chest: and they published it, without any discoverable 
order as to time or otherwise; — ^merely trying, as would 
seem, and this not very strictly, to put the longest chapters 
first. The real beginning of it, in that way, lies almost at 
the end: for the earliest portions. were the shortest. Read 
in its historical sequence it perhaps would not be so bad. 
Much of it, too, they say, is rhythmic ; a kind of wild chant- 
ing song, in the original. This may be a great point; much 
perhaps has been lost in the Translation here. Yet wdth 
every allowance, one feels it difficult to see how any mortal 
ever could consider this Koran as a Book written in Heaven, 
too good for the Earth; as a well-written book, or indeed 



64 LECTURES ON HEROES 

as a book at all; and not a bewildered rhapsody; written, so 
far as writing goes, as badly as almost any book ever was ! 
So much for national discrepancies, and the standard of 
taste. 

Yet I should say, it was not unintelligible how the Arabs 
might so love it. When once you get this confused coil of 
a Koran fairly off your hands, and have it behind you at a 
distance, the essential type of it begins to disclose itself; 
and in this there is a merit quite other than the literary one. 
If a book come from the heart, it will contrive to reach 
other hearts; all art and authorcraft are of small amount 
to that. One would say the primary character of the Koran 
is this of its genuineness, of its being a hona-fide book. 
Prideaux, I know, and others have represented it as a mere 
bundle of juggleries; chapter after chapter got-up to excuse 
and varnish.the author's successive sins, forward his ambi- 
tions and quackeries: but really it is time to dismiss all 
that. I do not assert Mahomet's continual sincerity: who 
is continually sincere? But I confess I can make nothing 
of the critic, in these times, who would accuse him of deceit 
prepense; of conscious deceit generally, or perhaps at all; — 
still more, of living in a mere element of conscious deceit 
and writing this Koran , as a forger and juggler would have 
done! Every candid eye, I think, will read the Koran far 
otherwise than so. It is the confused ferment of a great 
rude human soul; rude, untutored, that cannot even read; 
but fervent, earnest, struggling vehemently to utter itself 
in words. With a kind of breathless intensity he strives to 
utter himself; the thoughts crowd on him pellmell : for very 
multitude of things to say, he can get nothing said. The 
meaning that is in him shapes itself into no form of com- 
position, is stated in no sequence, method, or coherence; — 
they are not shaped at all, these thoughts of his; flung-out 
unshaped, as they struggle and tumble there, in their 
chaotic inarticulate state. We said 'stupid:' yet natural 
stupidity is by no means the character of Mahomet's Book; 
it is natural uncultivation rather. The man has not studied 
speaking; in the haste and pressure of continual fighting, 



THE HERO AS PROPHET 65 

has not time to mature himself into fit speech. The pant- 
ing breathless haste and vehemence of a man struggling in 
the thick of battle for life and salvation; this is the mood 
he is in ! A headlong haste ; for very magnitude of meaning, 
he cannot get himself articulated into words. The succes- 
sive utterances of a soul in that mood, coloured by the 
various vicissitudes of three-and-twenty years; now well 
uttered, now worse : this is the Koran. 

For we are to consider Mahomet, through these three- 
and-twenty years, as the centre of a world wholly in con- 
flict. Battles with the Koreish and Heathen, quarrels 
among his own people, backslidings of his own wild heart; 
all this kept him in a perpetual whirl, his soul knowing rest 
no more. In wakeful nights, as one may fancy, the wild soul 
of the man, tossing amid these vortices, would hail any 
light of a decision for them as a veritable light from Heaven ; 
any making-up of his mind, so blessed, indispensable for 
him there, would seem the inspiration of a Gabriel. Forger 
and juggler? No, no ! This great fiery heart, seething, sim- 
mering like a great furnace of thoughts, was not a juggler's. 
His life was a Fact to him; this God's Universe an awful 
Fact and Reality. He has faults enough. The man was an 
uncultured semi-barbarous Son of Nature, much of the 
Bedouin still clinging to him: we must take him for that. 
But for a wretched Simulacrum, a hungry Impostor with- 
out eyes or heart, practising for a mess of pottage such blas- 
phemous swindlery, forgery of celestial documents, con- 
tinual high-treason against his Maker and Self, we will not 
and cannot take him. 

Sincerity, in all senses, seems to me the merit of the 
Koran; what had rendered it precious to the wild Arab 
men. It is, after all, the first and last merit in a book; 
gives rise to merits of all kinds, — nay, at bottom, it alone 
can give rise to merit of any kind. Curiously, through these 
incondite masses of tradition, vituperation, complaint, ejac- 
ulation in the Koran, a vein of true direct insight, of what 
we might almost call poetry, is found straggling. The 
body of the Book is made-up of mere tradition, and as it 
5 



66 LECTURES ON HEROES 

were vehement enthusiastic extempore preaching. He re- 
turns forever to the old stories of the Prophets as they went 
current in the Arab memory: how Prophet after Prophet, 
the Prophet Abraham, the Prophet Hud, the Prophet 
Moses, Christian and other real and fabulous Prophets, had 
come to this Tribe and to that, warning men of their sin; 
and been received by them even as he Mahomet was, — 
which is a great solace to him. These things he repeats ten, 
perhaps twenty times; again and ever again, with weari- 
some iteration; has never done repeating them-. A brave 
Samuel Johnson, in his forlorn garret, might con-over the 
Biographies of Authors in that way! This is the great 
staple of the Koran. But curiously, through all this, comes 
ever and anon some glance as of the real thinker and seer. 
He has actually an eye for the world, this Mahomet: with 
a certain directness and rugged vigour, he brings home still, 
to our heart, the thing his own heart has been opened to. 
I make but little of his praises of Allah, which many praise ; 
they are borrowed I suppose mainly from the Hebrew, at 
least they are far surpassed there. But the eye that flashes 
direct into the heart of things, and sees the truth of them; 
this is to me a highly interesting object. Great Nature's 
own gift ; which she bestows on all ; but which only one in 
the thousand does not cast- sorrowfully away: it is what I 
call sincerity of vision; the test of a sincere heart. 

Mahomet can work no miracles; he often answers im- 
patiently: I can work no miracles. I? 'I am a Public 
Preacher;' appointed to preach this doctrine to all crea- 
tures. Yet the world, as we can see, had really from of old 
been all one great miracle to him. Look over the world, 
says he; is it not wonderful, the work of Allah; wholly *a 
sign to you,' if your eyes were open ! This Earth, God made 
it for you ; ' appointed paths in it ; ' you can live in it, go to 
and fro on it. — The clouds in the dry country of Arabia, to 
Mahomet they are very wonderful: Great clouds, he says, 
born in the deep bosom of the Upper Immensity, where do 
they come from! They hang there, the great black mon- 
sters; pour-down their rain-deluges 'to revive a dead earth,' 



THE HERO AS PROPHET 67 

and grass springs, and Hall leafy palm-trees with their date- 
' clusters hanging round. Is not that a sign?' Your cattle 
too, — Allah made them; serviceable dumb creatures; they 
change the grass into milk; you have your clothing from 
them, very strange creatures; they come ranking home at 
evening-time, 'and,' adds he, 'and are a credit to you!' 
Ships also, — he talks often about ships: Huge moving 
mountains, they spread-out their cloth wings, go bounding 
through the water there. Heaven's wind driving them; 
anon they lie motionless, God has withdrawn the wind, they 
lie dead, and cannot stir! Miracles? cries he: What miracle 
would you have? Are not you yourselves there? God made 
you, ' shaped you out of a little clay.' Ye were small once; a 
few years ago ye were not at all. Ye have beauty, strength, 
thoughts, 'ye have compassion on one another.' Old age 
comes-on you, and gray hairs; your strength fades into 
feebleness; ye sink down, and again are not. 'Ye have 
compassion on one another : ' this struck me much : Allah 
might have made you having no compassion on one an- 
other, — how had it been then! This is a great direct 
thought, a glance at first-hand into the very fact of things. 
Rude vestiges of poetic genius, of whatsoever is best and 
truest, are visible in this man. A strong untutored in- 
tellect ; eyesight, heart : a strong wild man, — might have 
shaped himself into Poet, King, Priest, any kind of Hero. 

To his eyes it is forever clear that this world wholly is 
miraculous. He sees what, as we said once before, all great 
thinkers, the rude Scandinavians themselves, in one way or 
other, have contrived to see: That this so solid-looking 
material world is, at bottom, in very deed, Nothing; is a 
visual and tactual Manifestation of God's power and pres- 
ence, — a shadow hung-out by Him on the bosom of the 
void Infinite ; nothing more. The mountains, he says, these 
great rock-mountains, they shall dissipate themselves 'like 
clouds ; ' melt into the Blue as clouds do, and not be ! He 
figures the Earth, in the Arab fashion, Sale tells us, as an 
immense Plain or flat Plate of ground, the mountains are 
set on that to steady it. At the Last Day they shall disap- 



68 LECTURES ON HEROES 

pear 'like clouds ; ' the whole Earth shall go spinning, whirl 
itself off into wreck, and as dust and vapour vanish in the 
Inane. Allah withdraws his hand from it, and it ceases to 
be. The universal empire of Allah, presence everywhere of 
an unspeakable Power, a Splendour, and a Terror not to be 
named, as the true force, essence and reality, in all things 
whatsoever, was continually clear to this man. What a 
modern talks-of by the name, Forces of Nature, Laws of 
Nature; and does not figure as a divine thing; not even as 
one thing at all, but as a set of things, undivine enough, — 
saleable, curious, good for propelling steam-ships! With 
our Sciences and Cyclopaedias, we are apt to forget the di- 
vineness, in those laboratories of ours. We ought not to 
forget it! That once well forgotten, I know not what else 
were worth remembering. Most sciences, I think, were 
then a very dead thing; withered, contentious, empty; — a 
thistle in late autumn. The best Science, without this, is but 
as the dead timber; it is not the growing tree and forest, — 
which gives ever-new timber, among other things! Man 
cannot know either, unless he can icorship in some way. 
His knowledge is a pedantry, and dead thistle, otherwise. 

Much has been said and written about the sensuality 
of Mahomet's Religion; more than was just. The indul- 
gences, criminal to us, which he permitted, were not of 
his appointment; he found them practised, unquestioned 
from immemorial time in Arabia; what he did was to cur- 
tail them, restrict them, not on one but on many sides. His 
Religion is not an easy one : with rigorous fasts, lavations, 
strict complex formulas, prayers five times a day, and ab- 
stinence from wine, it did not 'succeed by being an easy 
religion.' As if indeed any religion, or cause holding of 
religion, could succeed by that! It is a calumny on men to 
say that they are roused to heroic action by ease, hope of 
pleasure, recompense, — sugar-plums of any kind, in this 
world or the next ! In the meanest mortal there lies some- 
thing nobler. The poor swearing soldier, hired to be shot, 
has his ' honour of a soldier,' different from drill-regulations 
and the shilling a day. It is not to taste sweet things, 



THE HERO AS PROPHET 69 

but to do noble and true things, and vindicate himself 
under God's Heaven as a god-made Man, that the poorest 
son of Adam dimly longs. Show him the way of doing 
that, the dullest daydrudge kindles into a hero. They 
wrong man greatly who say he is to be seduced by ease. 
Difficulty, abnegation, rnartyrdom, death are the allure- 
ments that act on the heart of man. Kindle the inner 
genial life of him, you have a flame that burns-up all 
lower considerations. Not happiness, but something 
higher: one sees this even in the frivolous classes, with 
their ' point of honour ' and the like. Not by flattering our 
appetites; no, by awakening the Heroic that slumbers in 
every heart, can any Religion gain followers. 

Mahomet himself, after all that can be said about him, 
was not a sensual man. We shall err widely if we consider 
this man as a common voluptuary, intent mainly on base 
enjoyments, — nay on enjoyments of any kind. His house- 
hold was of the frugalest; his common diet barley-bread 
and water: sometimes for months there was not a fire once 
lighted on his hearth. They record with just pride that he 
would mend his own shoes, patch his own cloak. A poor, 
hard-toiling, ill-provided man; careless of what vulgar men 
toil for. Not a bad man, I should say ; something better in 
him than hunger of any sort, — or these wild Arab men, 
fighting and jostling three- and- twenty years at his hand, in 
close contact with him always, would not have reverenced 
him so ! They were wild men, bursting ever and anon into 
quarrel, into all kinds of fierce sincerity; without right 
worth and manhood, no man could have commanded them. 
They called him Prophet, you say? Why, he stood there face 
to face with them; bare, not enshrined in any mystery; 
visibly clouting his own cloak, cobbling his own shoes; 
fighting, counselling, ordering in the midst of them: they 
must have seen what kind of a man he was, let him be called 
what you like ! No emperor with his tiaras was obeyed as 
this man in a cloak of his own clouting. During three-and- 
twenty years of rough actual trial. I find something of a 
veritable Hero necessary for that, of itself. 



70 LECTURES ON HEROES 

His last words are a prayer; broken ejaculations of a 
heart struggling-up, in trembling hope, towards its Maker. 
We cannot say that his religion made him worse; it made 
him better; good, not bad. Generous things are recorded 
of him : when he lost his Daughter, the thing he answers is, 
in his own dialect, everyway sincere, and yet equivalent to 
that of Christians, 'The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh 
away; blessed be the name of the Lord.' He answered in 
like manner of Seid, his emancipated well-beloved Slave, 
the second of the believers. Seid had fallen in the War of 
Tabuc, the first of Mahomet's fightings with the Greeks. 
Mahomet said. It was well; Seid had done his Master's 
work, Seid had now gone to his Master: it was all well with 
Seid. Yet Seid's daughter found him weeping over the 
body; — the old gray-haired man melting in tears! "What 
do I see?" said she. — "You see a friend weeping over his 
friend."— He went out for the last time into the mosque, 
two days before his death; asked, If he had injured any 
man? Let his own back bear the stripes. If he owed any 
man? A voice answered, "Yes, me three drachms," bor- 
rowed on such an occasion. Mahomet ordered them to be 
paid: " Better be in shame now," said he, " than at the Day 
of Judgment." — You remember Kadijah, and the "No, by 
Allah ! " Traits of that kind show us the genuine man, the 
brother of us all, brought visible through twelve centuries, 
— the veritable Son of our common Mother. 

Withal I like Mahomet for his total freedom from cant. 
He is a rough self-helping son of the wilderness; does not 
pretend to be what he is not. There is no ostentatious 
pride in him; but neither does he go much upon humility: 
he is there as he can be, in cloak and shoes of his own clout- 
ing; speaks plainly to all manner of Persian Kings, Greek 
Emperors, what it is they are bound to do; knows well 
enough, about himself, 'the respect due unto thee.' In a 
life and-death war with Bedouins, cruel things could not 
fail ; but neither are acts of mercy, of noble natural pity and 
generosity wanting. Mahomet makes no apology for the 
one, no boast of the other. They were each the free dictate 



THE HERO AS PROPHET 71 

of his heart ; each called-for, there and then. Not a mealy- 
mouthed man ! A candid ferocity, if the case call for it, is in 
him ; he does not mince matters ! The War of Tabuc is a 
thing he often speaks of: his men refused, many of them, 
to march on that occasion; pleaded the heat of the weather, 
the harvest, and so forth; he can never forget that. Your 
harvest? It lasts for a day. What will become of your 
harvest through all Eternity? Hot weather? Yes, it was 
hot; 'but Hell will be hotter!' Sometimes a rough sar- 
casm turns-up: He says to the unbelievers. Ye shall have 
the just measure of your deeds -at that Great Day. They 
will be weighed-out to you; ye shall not have short weight! 
— Everywhere he fixes the matter in his eye ; he sees it : his 
heart, now and then, is as if struck dumb by the greatness 
of it. 'Assuredly,' he says: that word, in the Koran, is 
written-down sometimes as a sentence by itself : ' Assuredly.' 

No Dilettantism in this Mahomet; it is a business of Rep- 
robation and Salvation with him, of Time and Eternity: 
he is in deadly earnest about it ! Dilettantism, hypothesis, 
speculation, a kind of amateur-search for Truth, toying and 
coquetting with Truth: this is the sorest sin. The root of 
all other imaginable sins. It consists in the heart and soul 
of the man never having been open to Truth; — 'living in a 
vain show.' Such a man not only utters and produces 
falsehoods, but is himself a falsehood. The rational moral 
principle, spark of the Divinity, is sunk deep in him, in 
quiet paralysis of life-death. The very falsehoods of Ma- 
homet are truer than the truths of such a man. He is the 
insincere man: smooth-polished, respectable in some times 
and places; inoffensive, says nothing harsh to anybody; 
most cleanly, — just as carbonic acid is, which is death and 
poison. 

We will not praise Mahomet's moral precepts as always 
of the superfinestsort; yet it can be said that there is al- 
ways a tendency to good in them; that they are the true 
dictates of a heart aiming towards what is just and true. 
The sublime forgiveness of Christianity, turning of the other 
cheek when the one has been smitten, is not here : you are 



72 LECTURES ON HEROES 

to revenge yourself, but it is to be in measure, not over- 
much, or beyond justice. On the other hand, Islam, like 
any great Faith, and insight into the essence of man, is a 
perfect equaliser of men : the soul of one believer outweighs 
all earthly kingships; all men, according to Islam too, are 
equal. Mahomet insists not on the propriety of giving alms, 
but on the necessity of it: he marks-down by laAv how 
much you are to give, and it is at your peril if you neglect. 
The tenth part of a man's annual income, whatever that 
may be, is the property of the poor, of those that are af- 
flicted and need help. Good all this: the natural voice of 
humanity, of pity and equity dwelling in the heart of this 
wild Son of Nature speaks so. 

Mahomet's Paradise is sensual, his Hell sensual: true; 
in the one and the other there is enough that shocks all 
spiritual feeling in us. But we are to recollect that the 
Arabs already had it so; that Mahomet, in whatever he 
changed of it, softened and diminished all this. The worst 
sensualities, too, are the work of doctors, followers of his, 
not his work. In the Koran there is really very little said 
about the joys of Paradise; they are intimated rather than 
insisted on. Nor is it forgotten that the highest joys even 
there shall be spiritual; the pure Presence of the Highest, 
this shall infinitely transcend all other joys. He says, 
'Your salutation shall be. Peace.' Salam, Have Peace! — 
the thing that all rational souls long for, and seek, vainly 
here below, as the one blessing. 'Ye shall sit on seats, 
' facing one another : all grudges shall be taken away out of 
'your hearts.' All grudges! Ye shall love one another 
freely ; for each of you, in the eyes of his brothers, there 
will be Heaven enough ! 

In "reference to this of the sensual Paradise and Maho- 
met's sensuality, the sorest chapter of all for us, there were 
many things to be said; which it is not convenient to enter 
upon here. Two remarks only I shall make, and therewith 
leave it to your candour. The first is furnished me by 
Goethe; it is a casual hint of his which seems well worth 
taking note of. In one of his Delineations, in Meister's 



THE HERO AS PROPHET 73 

Travels it is, the hero comes-upon a Society of men with 
very strange ways, one of which was this: ''We require/' 
saj^s the Master, " that each of our people shall restrict him- 
self in one direction," shall go right against his desire in one 
matter, and make himself do the thing he does not wish, 
''should we allow him the greater latitude on all other 
sides." There seems to me a great justness in this. Enjoy- 
ing things which are pleasant; that is not the evil: it is the 
reducing of our moral self to slavery by them that is. Let 
a man assert withal that he is king over his habitudes; that 
he could and would shake them off, on cause shown : this is 
an excellent law. The Month Ramadhan for the Moslem, 
much in Mahomet's Religion, much in his own Life, bears in 
that direction; if not by forethought, or clear purpose of 
moral improvement on his part, then by a certain healthy 
manful instinct, which is as good. 

But there is another thing to be said about the Mahome- 
tan Heaven and Hell. This namely, that, however gross 
and material they may be, they are an emblem of an ever- 
lasting truth, not always so well remembered elsewhere. 
That gross sensual Paradise of his; that horrible flaming 
Hell ; the great enormous Day of Judgment he perpetually 
insists on: what is all this but a rude shadow, in the rude 
Bedouin imagination, of that grand spiritual Fact, and Be- 
ginning of Facts, which it is ill for us too if we do not all 
know and feel: the Infinite Nature of Duty? That man's 
actions here are of in-finite moment to him, and never die or 
end at all; that man, with his little life, reaches upwards 
high as Heaven, downwards low as Hell, and in his three- 
score years of Time holds an Eternity fearfully and wonder- 
fully hidden : all this had burnt itself, as in flame-characters, 
into the wild Arab soul. As in flame and lightning, it stands 
written there; awful, unspeakable, ever present to him. 
With bursting earnestness, with a fierce savage sincerity, 
halt, articulating, not able to articulate, he strives to speak 
it, bodies it forth in that Heaven and Hell. Bodied forth in 
what way you will, it is the first of all truths. It is vener- 
able under all embodiments. What is the chief end of man 



74v LECTURES ON HEROES 

here below? Mahomet lias answered this question, in a way 
that might put some of us to shame! He does not, Hke a 
Bentham, a Paley, take Right and Wrong, and calculate the 
profit and loss, ultimate pleasure of the one and of the other ; 
and summing all up by addition and subtraction into a net 
result, ask you. Whether on the whole the Right does not 
preponderate considerably? No ; it is not better to do the one 
than the other; the one is to the other as life is to death, 
— as Heaven is to Hell. The one must in nowise be done, 
the other in nowise left undone. You shall not measure 
them; they are incommensurable: the one is death eternal 
to a man, the other is life eternal. Benthamee Utility, 
virtue by Profit and Loss; reducing this God's- world to a 
dead brute Steam-engine, the infinite celestial Soul of Man 
to a kind of Hay-balance for weighing hay and thistles on, 
pleasures and pains on: — If you ask me which gives, Ma- 
homet or they, the beggarlier and falser view of Man and his 
Destinies in this Universe, I will answer. It is not Ma- 
homet ! 

On the whole, we will repeat that this Religion of Ma- 
homet's is a kind of Christianity; has a genuine element of 
what is spiritually highest looking through it, not to be hid- 
den by all its imperfections. The Scandinavian God Wish, 
the god of all rude men, — this has been enlarged into a 
Heaven by Mahomet; but a Heaven symbolical of sacred 
Duty, and to be earned by faith and welldoing, by valiant 
action, and a divine patience which is still more valiant. It 
is Scandinavian Paganism, and a truly celestial element 
superadded to that. Call it not false; look not at the false- 
hood of it, look at the truth of it. For these twelve centu- 
ries, it has been the religion and life-guidance of the fifth 
part of the whole kindred of Mankind. Above all things, it 
has been a religion heartily believed. These Arabs believe 
their religion, and try to live by it! No Christians, since 
the early ages, or only perhaps the English Puritans in mod- 
ern times, have ever stood by their Faith as the Moslem do 
by theirs, — believing it wholly, fronting Time with it, and 
Eternity with it. This night the watchman on the streets of 



THE HERO AS PROPHET 75 

Cairo when he cries, "Who goes?" will hear from the pas- 
senger, along with his answer, "There is no God but God." 
Allah akbar, Islam, sounds through the souls, and whole 
daily existence, of these dusky millions. Zealous mission- 
aries preach it abroad among Malays, black Papuans, brutal 
Idolaters ; — displacing what is worse, nothing that is better 
or good. 

To the Arab Nation it was as a birth from darkness into 
light; Arabia first became alive by means of it. A poor 
shepherd people, roaming unnoticed in its deserts since the 
creation of the world: a Hero-Prophet was sent down to 
them with a word they could believe: see, the unnoticed 
becomes world-notable, the small has grown world-great; 
within one century afterwards, Arabia is at Grenada on this 
hand, at Delhi on that; — glancing in valour and splendour 
and the light of genius, Arabia shines through long ages over 
a great section of the world. Belief is great, live-giving. 
The history of a Nation becomes fruitful, soul-elevating, 
great, so soon as it believes. These Arabs, the man Ma- 
homet, and that one century, — is it not as if a spark had 
fallen, one spark, on a world of what seemed black unno- 
ticeable sand; /but lo, the sand proves explosive powder, 
blazes heaven-high from Delhi to Grenada! I said, the 
Great Man was always as lightning out of Heaven ; the rest 
of men waited for him like fuel, and then they too would 
flame. 



LECTURE III. 

THE HERO AS POET. DANTE; SHAKSPEARE. 
[Tuesday, 12th May 1840.] 

The Hero as Divinity, the Hero as Prophet, are productions 
of old ages ; not to be repeated in the new. They presup- 
pose a certain rudeness of conception, which the progress of 
mere scientific knowledge puts an end to. There needs to 
be, as it were, a world vacant, or almost vacant of scientific 
forms, if men in their loving wonder are to fancy their fellow- 
man either a god or one speaking with the voice of a god. 
Divinity and Prophet are past. We are now to see our Hero 
in the less ambitious, but also less questionable, character 
of Poet; a character which does not pass. The Poet is a 
heroic figure belonging to all ages; whom all ages possess, 
when once he is produced, whom the newest age as the oldest 
may produce; — and will produce, always when Nature 
pleases. Let Nature send a Hero-soul ; in no age is it other 
than possible that he may be shaped into a Poet. 

Hero, Prophet, Poet, — many different names, in different 
times and places, do we give to Great Men; according to 
varieties we note in them, according to the sphere in which 
they have displayed themselves! We might give many 
more names, on this same principle. I will remark again, 
however, as a fact not unimportant to be understood, that 
the different sphere constitutes the grand origin of such dis- 
tinction; that the Hero can be Poet, Prophet, King, Priest 
or what you will, according to the kind of world he finds him- 
self born into. I confess, I have no notion of a truly great 
man that could not be all sorts of men. The Poet who could 
merely sit on a chair, and compose stanzas, would never 
make a stanza worth much. He could not sing the Heroic 

76 



THE HERO AS POET 77 

warrior, unless he himself were at least a Heroic warrior too. 
I fancy there is in him the Politician, the Thinker, Legis- 
lator, Philosopher; — in one or the other degree, he could 
have been, he is all these. So too I cannot understand how 
a Mirabeau, with that great glowing heart, with the fire that 
was in it, with the bursting tears that were in it, could not 
have written verses, tragedies, poems, and touched all hearts 
in that way, had his course of life and education led him 
thitherward. The grand fundamental character is that of 
Great Man ; that the man be great. Napoleon has words 
in him which are like Austerlitz Battles. Louis Fourteenth's 
Marshals are a kind of poetical men withal; the things 
Turenne says are full of sagacity and geniality, like sayings 
of Samuel Johnson. The great heart, the clear deep-seeing 
eye: there it lies; no man whatever, in what province so- 
ever, can prosper at all mthout these. Petrarch and Boc- 
caccio did diplomatic messages, it seems, quite well: one 
can easily believe it; they had done things a little harder 
than these ! Burns, a gifted song- writer, might have made 
a still better Mirabeau. Shakspeare, — one knows not what 
he could not have made, in the supreme degree. 

True, there are aptitudes of Nature too. Nature does 
not make all great men, more than all other men, in the self- 
same mould. Varieties of aptitude doubtless ; but infinitely 
more of circumstance; and far oftenest it is the latter only 
that are looked to. But it is as with common men in the 
learning of trades. You take any man, as yet a vague capa- 
bility of a man, who could be any land of craftsman; and 
make him into a smith, a carpenter, a mason: he is then 
and thenceforth that and nothing else. And if, as Addison 
complains, you sometimes see a street-porter staggering 
under his load on spindle-shanks, and near at hand a tailor 
with the frame of a Samson handling a bit of cloth and small 
Whitechapel needle, — it cannot be considered that aptitude 
of Nature alone has been consulted here either ! — The Great 
Man also, to what shall he be bound apprentice? Given 
your Hero, is he to become Conqueror, King, Philosopher, 
Poet? It is an inexplicably complex controversial-calcula- 



78 LECTURES ON HEROES 

tion between the world and him ! He ■\\dll read the world 
and its laws ; the world with its laws will be there to be read. 
What the world, on this "matter, shall permit and bid is, as 
we said, the most important fact about the world. — 

Poet and Prophet differ greatly in our loose modern 
notions of them. In some old languages, again, the titles 
are synonymous; Vates means both Prophet and Poet: and 
indeed at all times. Prophet and Poet, well understood, have 
much kindred of meaning. Fundamentally indeed they are 
still the same; in this most important respect especially, 
That they have penetrated both of them into the sacred 
mystery. of the Universe; what Goethe calls 'the open 
secret.' "Which is the great secret?" asks one. — "The 
open secret," — open to all, seen by almost none! That 
divine mystery, which lies everywhere in all Beings, Hhe 
' Divine Idea of the World, that which lies at the bottom 
' of Appearance, ' as Fichte styles it; of which all Appearance, 
from the starry sky to the grass of the field, but especially 
the Appearance of Man and his work, is but the vesture, the 
embodiment that renders it visible. This divine mystery / 
is in all times and in all places; veritably is. In most times J 
and places it is greatly overlooked; and the Universe,^ 
definable always in one or the other dialect, as the realised 
Thought of God, is considered a trivial, inert, commonplace 
matter, — as if, says the Satirist, it were a dead thing, which 
some upholsterer had put together ! It could do no good, 
at present, to speak much about this; but it is a pity for 
every one of us if we do not know it, live ever in the knowl- 
edge of it. Really a most mournful pity; — a failure to live 
at all, if we live otherwise ! 

But now, I say, whoever may forget this divine mystery, 
the Vates, whether Prophet or Poet, has penetrated into it; 
is a man sent hither to make it more impressively known to 
us. That always is his message ; he is to reveal that to us, — 
that sacred mystery which he more than others lives ever 
present with. While others forget it, he know^s it ; — I might 
say, he has been driven to know it; without consent asked 



THE HERO AS POET 79 

of him, he finds himself living in it, bound to live in it. 
Once more, here is no Hearsay, but a direct Insight and 
Belief; this man too could not help being a sincere man! 
Whosoever may live in the shows of things, it is for him a 
necessity of nature to live in the very fact of things. A 
man once more, in earnest with the Universe, though all 
others were but toying with it. He is a Vates, first of all, in 
virtue of being sincere. So far Poet and Prophet, partici- 
pators in the ' open secret, ' are one. 

With respect to their distinction again: The Vates 
Prophet, we might say, has seized that sacred mystery 
rather on the moral side, as Good and Evil, Duty and Pro- 
hibition; the Vates Poet on what the Germans call the 
aesthetic side, as Beautiful, and the like. The one we may 
call a revealer of what we are to do, the other of what we are 
to love. But indeed these two provinces run into one an- 
other, and cannot be disjoined. The Prophet too has his 
eye on what we are to love: how else shall he know what 
it is we are to do? The highest Voice ever heard on this 
earth said withal, " Consider the lilies of the field ; they toil 
" not, neither do they spin : yet Solomon in all his glory was 
" not arrayed like one" of these. " A glance, that, into the 
deepest deep of Beauty. ' The lilies of the field, ' — dressed 
finer than earthly princes, springing-up there in the humble 
furrow-field; a beautiful eye looking-out on you, from the 
great inner Sea of Beauty! How could the rude Earth 
make these, if her Essence, rugged as she looks and is, were 
not inwardly Beauty? In this point of view, too, a saying 
of Goethe's, which has staggered several, may have mean- 
ing: 'The Beautiful,' he intimates, 4s higher than the 
'Good; the Beautiful includes in it the Good.' The true 
Beautiful ; which, however, I have said somewhere, ' differs 
from the false as Heaven does from Vauxhall ! ' So much 
for the distinction and identity of Poet and Prophet. — 

In ancient and also in modern periods we find a few Poets 
who are accounted perfect; whom it were a kind of treason 
to find fault with. This is noteworthy; this is right: yet 
in strictness it is only an illusion. At bottom, clearly 



80 LECTURES ON HEROES 

enough, there is no perfect Poet! A vein of Poetry exists 
in the hearts of all men; no man is made altogether of 
Poetry. We are all poets when we read a poem well. The 
' imagination that shudders at the Hell of Dante, ' is not that 
the same faculty, weaker in degree, as Dante's own? No 
one but Shakspeare can embody, out of Saxo Grammaticus, 
the story of Hamlet as Shakspeare did : but every one models 
some kind of story out of it; every one embodies it better 
or worse. We need not spend time in defining. Where 
there is no specific difference, as between round and square, 
all definition must be more or less arbitrary. A man that 
has so much more of the poetic element developed in him as 
to have become noticeable, will be called Poet by his neigh- 
bours. World-Poets too, those whom we are to take for 
perfect Poets, are settled by critics in the same way. One 
who rises so far above the general level of Poets mil, to such 
and such critics, seem a Universal Poet; as he ought to do. 
And yet it is, and must be, an arbitrar}^ distinction. All 
Poets, all men, have some touches of the Universal; no man 
is wholly made of that. Most Poets are very soon forgotten : 
but not the noblest Shakspeare or Homer of them can be 
remembered forever; — a day comes when he too is not! 

Nevertheless, you Tvdll say, there must be a difference be- 
tween true Poetry and true Speech not poetical : what is the 
difference? On this point many things have been written, 
especially by late German Critics, some of which are not very 
intelligible at first. They say, for example, that the Poet 
has an infinitude in him; communicates an Unendlichkeit, 
a certain character of 'infinitude,' to whatsoever he de- 
lineates. This, though not very precise, yet on so vague a 
matter is worth remembering: if well meditated, some 
meaning will gradually be found in it. For my own part, 
I find considerable meaning in the old vulgar distinction 
of Poetry being metrical, having music in it, being a Song. 
Truly, if pressed to give a definition, one might say this as 
soon as anything else: If your delineation be authentically 
musical, musical not in word only, but in heart and sub- 
stance, in all the thoughts and utterances of it, in the whole 



THE HERO AS POET 81 

conception of it, then it will be poetical; if not, not. — Mus- 
ical: how much lies in that! A musical thought is one 
spoken by a mind that has penetrated into the inmost heart 
of the thing; detected the inmost mystery of it, namely the 
melody that lies hidden in it; the inward harmony of coher- 
ence which is its soul, whereby it exists, and has a right to 
be, here in this world. All inmost things, we may say, are 
melodious ; naturally utter themselves in Song. The mean- 
ing of Song goes deep. Who is there that, in logical words, 
can express the effect music has on us? A kind of inartic- 
ulate unfathomable speech, which leads us to the edge of 
the Infinite, and lets us for a moment gaze into that ! 

Nay all speech, even the commonest speech, has some- 
thing of song in it: not a parish in the world but has its 
parish-accent; — -the rhythm or tune to which the people 
there sing what they have to say ! Accent is a kind of chant- 
ing; all men have accent of their own, — though they only 
notice that of others. Observe too how all passionate 
language does of itself become musical, — with a finer music 
than the mere accent; the speech of a man even in zealous 
anger becomes a chant, a song. All deep things are Song. 
It seems somehow the very central essence of us. Song; as 
if all the rest were but wrappages and hulls! The primal 
element of us; of us, and of all things. The Greeks fabled 
of Sphere-Harmonies: it was the feeling they had of the 
inner structure of Nature; that the soul of all her voices 
and utterances was perfect music. Poetry, therefore, we 
will call musical Thought. The Poet is, he who thinks in 
that manner. At bottom, it turns still on power of intellect ; 
it is a man's sincerity and depth of vision that makes him a 
Poet. See deep enough, and you will see musically; the 
heart of Nature being everywhere music, if you can only 
reach it. 

The Vates. Poet, with his melodious Apocalypse of 
Nature, seems to hold a poor rank among us, in comparison 
with the Vates Prophet; his function, and our esteem of him 
for his function, alike slight. The Hero taken as Divinity ; 
the Hero taken as Prophet; then next the Hero taken only 



82 LECTURES ON HEROES 

as Poet : does it not look as if our estimate of the Great Man, 
epoch after epoch, were continually diminishing? We take 
him first for a god, then for one god-inspired; and now in 
the next stage of it, his most miraculous word gains from 
us only the recognition that he is a Poet, beautiful verse- 
maker, man of genius, or suchlike ! — It looks so ; but I per- 
suade myself that intrinsically it is not so. If we consider 
well, it will perhaps appear that in man still there is the 
same altogether peculiar admiration for the Heroic Gift, by 
what name soever called, that there at any time was. 

I should say, if we do • not now reckon a Great Man 
literally divine, it is that our notions of God, of the supreme 
unattainable Fountain of Splendour, Wisdom and Heroism, 
are ever rising higher; not altogether that our reverence for 
these qualities, as manifested in our like, is getting lower. 
This is worth taking thought of. Sceptical Dilettantism, 
the curse of these ages, a curse which will not last forever, 
does indeed in this the highest province of human things, 
as in all provinces, make sad work; and our reverence for 
great men, all crippled, blinded, paralytic as it is, comes out 
in poor plight, hardly recognisable. Men worship the shows 
of great men; the most disbelieve that there is any reality 
of great men to worship. The dreariest, fatalest faith; 
believing which, one would literally despair of human things. 
Nevertheless look, for example, at Napoleon! A Corsican 
lieutenant of artillery ; that is the show of him; yet is he not 
obeyed, worshipped after his sort, as all the Tiaraed and the 
Diademed of the world put together could not be? High 
Duchesses, and ostlers of inns, gather round the Scottish 
rustic. Burns; — a strange feeling dwelling in each that they 
neyer heard a man like this ; that, on the whole, this is the 
man! In the secret heart of these people it still dimly 
reveals itself, though there is no accredited way of uttering 
it at present, that this rustic, with his black brows and flash- 
ing sun-eyes, and strange words moving laughter and tears, 
is of a dignity far beyond all others, incommensurable with 
all others. Do we not feel it so? But now, were Dilet- 
tantism, Scepticism, Triviality, and all that sorrowful brood, 



THE HERO AS POET 83 

cast-out of us, — as, by God's blessing, they shall one day be; 
were faith in the shows of things entirely swept-out, replaced 
by clear faith in the things, so that a man acted on the im- 
pulse of that only, and counted the other non-extant; what 
a new livelier feeling towards this Burns were it ! 

Nay here in these ages, such as they are, have we not 
two mere Poets, if not deified, yet we may say beatified? 
Shakspeare and Dante are Saints of Poetry; really, if we 
will think of it, canonised, so that it is impiety to meddle 
with them. The unguided instinct of the world, working 
across all these perverse impediments, has arrived at such 
result. Dante and Shakspeare are a peculiar Two. They 
dwell apart, in a kind of royal solitude; none equal, none 
second to them: in the general feeling of the world, a cer- 
tain transcendentalism, a glory as of complete perfection, 
invests these two. They are canonised, though no Pope or 
Cardinals took hand in doing it! Such, in spite of every 
perverting influence, in the most unheroic times, is still our 
indestructible reverence for heroism. — We will look a little 
at these Two, the Poet Dante and the Poet Shakspeare: 
what little it is permitted us to say here of the Hero as Poet 
will most fitly arrange itself in that fashion. 

Many volumes have been written by way of commentary 
on Dante and his Book; yet, on the whole, with no great 
result. His Biography is, as it were, irrecoverably lost for 
us. An unimportant, wandering, sorrowstricken man, not 
much note was taken of him while he lived; and the most 
of that has vanished, in the long space that now intervenes. 
It is five centuries since he ceased writing and Hving here. 
After all commentaries, the Book itself is mainly what we 
know of him. The Book; — and one might add that Por- 
trait commonly attributed to Giotto, which, looking on it, 
you cannot help inclining to think genuine, whoever did it. 
To me it is a most touching face ; perhaps of all faces that 
I know, the most so. Lonely there, painted as on vacancy, 
with the simple laurel wound round it ; the deathless sorrow 
and pain, the known victory which is also deathless ; — sig- 



84 LECTURES ON HEROES 

nificant of the whole history of Dante! I think it is the 
mournfulest face that ever was painted from reaUty; an 
altogether tragic, heart-affecting face. There is in it, as 
foundation of it, the softness, tenderness, gentle affection 
as of a thild ; but all this is as if congealed into sharp contra- 
diction, into abnegation, isolation, proud hopeless pain. 
A soft ethereal soul looking-out so stern, implacable, grim- 
trenchant, as from imprisonment of thick-ribbed ice ! With- 
al it is a silent pain too, a silent scornful one: the lip is 
curled in a kind of godlike disdain of the thing that is eating- 
out his heart, — as if it were withal a mean insignificant 
thing, as if he whom it had power to torture and strangle 
were greater than it. The face of one wholly in protest, 
and lifelong unsurrendering battle, against the world. Af- 
fection all converted into indignation: an implacable in- 
dignation; slow, equable, silent, like that of a god! The 
eye too, it looks-out as in a kind of surprise, a kind of inquiry. 
Why the world was of such a sort? This is Dante: so he 
looks, this 'voice of ten silent centuries,' and sings us his 
'mystic unfathomable song.' 

The little that we know of Dante's Life corresponds well 
enough with this Portrait^and this Book. He was born at 
Florence, in the upper class of society, in the year 1265. His 
education was the best then going; much school-divinity, 
Aristotelean logic, some Latin classics, — no inconsiderable 
insight into certain provinces of things : and Dante, with his 
earnest intelligent nature, we need not doubt, learned better 
than most all that was learnable. He has a clear cultivated 
understanding, and of great subtlety; this best fruit of 
education he had contrived to realise from these scholas- 
tics. He knows accurately and well what hes close to him; 
but, in such a time, without printed books or free inter- 
course, he could not know well what was distant: the small 
clear light, most luminous for what is near, breaks itself into 
singular chiaroscuro striking on what is far off. This was 
Dante's learning from the schools. In life, he had gone 
through the usual destinies; been twice out campaigning as 
a soldier for the Florentine State, been on embassy; had 



THE HERO AS POET 85 

in his thirty-fifth year, by natural gradation of talent and 
service, become one of the Chief Magistrates of Florence. 
He had met in boyhood a certain Beatrice Portinari, a 
beautiful little girl of his own age and rank, and grown-up 
thenceforth in partial sight of her, in some distant inter- 
course with her. All readers know his graceful affecting 
account of this ; and then of their being parted ; of her being 
wedded to another, and of her death soon after. She makes 
a great figure in Dante's Poem ; seems to have made a great 
figure in his life. Of all beings it might seem as if she, held 
apart from him, far apart at last in the dim Eternity, were 
the only one he had ever with his whole strength of affection 
loved. She died: Dante himself was wedded; but it seems 
not happily, far from happily. I fancy, the rigorous earnest 
man, with his keen excitabilities, was not altogether easy 
to make happy. 

We will not complain of Dante's miseries : had all gone 
right with him as he wished it, he might have been Prior, 
Podesta, or whatsoever they call it, of Florence, well accepted 
among neighbours, — and the world had wanted one of the 
most notable words ever spoken or sung. Florence would 
have had another prosperous Lord Mayor; and the ten 
dumb centuries continued voiceless, and the ten other Hsten- 
ing centuries (for there will be ten of them arid more) had no 
Divina Commedia to hear! We will complain of nothing. 
A nobler destiny was appointed for this Dante; and he, 
struggling like a man led towards death and crucifixion, 
could not help fulfilling it. Give him the choice of his hap- 
piness! He knew not, more than we do, what was really 
happy, what was really miserable. 

In Dante's Priorship, the Guelf-Ghibelline, Bianchi- 
Neri, or some other confused disturbances rose to such a 
height, that Dante, whose party had seemed the stronger, 
was with his friends cast unexpectedly forth into banish- 
ment ; doomed thenceforth to a life of woe and wandering. 
His property was all confiscated and more; he had the 
fiercest feeling that it was entirely unjust, nefarious in the 
sight of God and man. He tried what was in him to get 



86 LECTURES ON HEROES 

reinstated; tried even by warlike surprisal, with arms" in his 
hand: but it would not do; bad only had become worse. 
There is a record, I believe, still extant in the Florence 
Archives, dooming this Dante, wheresoever caught, to be 
burnt alive. Burnt alive; so it stands, they say: a very 
curious civic document. Another curious document, some 
considerable number of years later, is a Letter of Dante's to 
the Florentine Magistrates, written in answer to a milder 
proposal of theirs, that he should return on condition of 
apologising and paying a fine. He answers, with fixed 
stern pride: "If I cannot return without calling myself 
guilty, I will never return, nunquam revertar. " 

For Dante there was now no home in this world. He 
wandered from patron to patron, from place to place; prov- 
ing, in his own bitter words, 'How hard is the path. Come 
e duro calle.' The wretched are not cheerful company, 
Dante, poor and banished, with his proud earnest nature, 
with his moody humours, was not a man to conciliate men. 
Petrarch reports of him that being at Can della Scala's court, 
and blamed one day for his gloom and taciturnity, he an- 
swered in no courtier-like way. Della Scala stood among 
his courtiers, with mimes and buffoons (nehulones ac his- 
triones) making him Heartily merry; when turning to Dante, 
he said: "Is it not strange, now, that this poor fool should 
make himself so entertaining; while you, a wise man, sit 
there day after day, and have nothing to amuse us with at 
all?" Dante answered bitterly: "No, not strange; your 
Highness is to recollect the Proverb, Like to Like; " — given 
the amuser, the amusee must also be given ! Such a man, 
with his proud silent ways, with his sarcasms and sorrows, 
was not made to succeed at court. By degrees, it came to 
be evident to him that he had no longer any resting-place, 
or hope of benefit, in this earth. The earthly world had 
cast him forth, to wander, wander; no living heart to love 
him now ; for his sore miseries there was no solace here. 

The deeper naturally would the Eternal World impress 
itself on him; that awful reality over which, after all, this 
Time-world, with its Florences and banishments, only flut- 



THE HERO AS POET 87 

ters as an unreal shadow. Florence thou shalt never see: 
but Hell and Purgatory and Heaven thou shalt surely see ! 
What is Florence, Can della Scala, and the World and Life 
altogether? Eternity : thither, of a truth, not elsewhither, 
art thou and all things bound! The great soul of Dante, 
homeless on earth, made its home more and more in that 
awful other world. Naturally his thoughts brooded on that, 
as on the one fact important for him. Bodied or bodiless, 
it is the one fact important for all men : — but to Dante, in 
that age, it was bodied in fixed certainty of scientific shape; 
he no more doubted of that Malebolge Pool, that it all lay 
there with its gloomy circles, with its alti guai, and that he 
himself should see it, than we doubt that we should see 
Constantinople if we went thither. Dante's heart, long 
filled with this, brooding over it in speechless thought and 
awe, bursts forth at length into ' mystic unfathomable song; ' 
and this his Divine Comedy, the most remarkable of all 
modern Books, is the result. 

It must have been a great solacement to Dante, and was, 
as we can see, a proud thought for him at times, That he, 
here in exile, could do this work; that no Florence, nor no 
man or men, could hinder him from doing it, or even much 
help him in doing it. He knew too, partly, that it was great ; 
the greatest a man could do. ' If thou follow thy star, Se 
tu segui tua stella, ' — so could the Hero, in his forsakenness, 
in his extreme need, still say to himself: " Follow thou thy 
star, thou shalt not fail of a glorious haven!" The labour 
of writing, we find, and indeed could know otherwise, was 
great and painful for him; he says. This Book, 'which has 
made me lean for many years. ' Ah yes, it was won, all of 
it, with pain and sore toil, — not in sport, but in grim earnest. 
His Book, as indeed most good Books are, has been written 
in many senses, with his heart's blood. It is his whole his- 
tory, this Book. He died after finishing it; not yet very 
old, at the age of fifty-six; — broken-hearted rather, as is 
said. He lies buried in his death-city Ravenna : Hie clavdor 
Dantes patriis extorris ab oris. The Florentines begged 
back his body, in a century after; the Ravenna people would 



88 LECTURES ON HEROES 

not give it. "Here am I Dante laid, shut-out from my 
native shores. " 

I said, Dante's Poem was a Song: it is Tieck who calls 
it ' a mystic unfathomable Song ; ' and such is literally the 
character of it. Coleridge remarks very pertinently some- 
where, that wherever you find a sentence musically worded, 
of true rhythm and melody in the words, there is something 
deep and good in the meaning too. For body and soul, 
word and idea, go strangely together here as everywhere. 
Song: we said before, it was the Heroic of Speech! All old 
Poems, Homer's and the rest, are authentically Songs. I 
would say, in strictness, that all right Poems are ; that what- 
soever is not sung is properly no Poem, but a piece of Prose 
cramped into jingling lines, — to the great injury of the gram- 
mar, to the great grief of the reader, for most part ! What 
we want to get at is the thought the man had, if he had any: 
why should he twist it into jingle, if he could speak it out 
plainly? It is only when the heart of him is rapt into true 
passion of melody, and the very tones of him, according to 
Coleridge's remark, become musical by the greatness, depth 
and music of his thoughts, that we can give him right to 
rh^TQe and sing; that we call him a Poet, and listen to him 
as the Heroic of Speakers, — whose speech is Song. Pre- 
tenders to this are many; and to an earnest reader, I doubt, 
it is for most part a very melancholy, not to say an in- 
supportable business, that of reading rhyme ! Rhyme that 
had no inward necessity to be rhymed; — it ought to have 
told us plainly, without any jingle, what it was aiming at. 
I would advise all men who can speak their thought, not to 
sing it; to understand that, in a serious time, among serious 
men, there is no vocation in them for singing it. Precisely 
as we love the true song, and are charmed by it as by some- 
thing divine, so shall we hate the false song, and account it 
a mere wooden noise, a thing hollow, superfluous, altogether 
an insincere and offensive thing. 

I give Dante my highest praise when I say of his Divine 
Comedy that it is, in all senses, genuinely a Song. In the 
very sound of it there is a canto fermo; it proceeds as by 



THE HERO AS POET 89 

a chant. The language, his simple terza rima, doubtless 
helped him in this. One reads along naturally with a sort 
of lilt. But I add, that it could not be otherwise; for the 
essence and material of the work are themselves rhythmic. 
Its depth, and rapt passion and sincerity, makes it musical ; — 
go deep enough, there is music everywhere. A true inward 
symmetry, what one calls an architectural harmony, reigns 
in it, proportionates it all: architectural; which also par- 
takes of the character of music. The thi-ee kingdoms, In- 
ferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso, look-out on one another like 
compartments of a great edifice ; a great supernatural world- 
cathedral, piled-up there, stern, solemn, awful; Dante's 
World of Souls ! It is, at bottom, the sincerest of all Poems; 
sincerity, here too, we find to be the measure of worth. It 
came deep out of the author's heart of hearts; and it goes 
deep, and through long generations, into ours. The people 
of Verona, when they saw him on the streets, used to say, 
" Eccovi V uom cN e stato alV Inferno, See, there is the man 
that was in Hell!" Ah yes, he had been in Hell; — in Hell 
enough, in long severe sorrow and struggle; as the like of 
him is pretty sure to have been. Commedias that come- 
out divine are not accomplished otherwise. Thought, true 
labour of any kind, highest virtue itself, is it not the daugh- 
ter of Pain? Born as out of the black whirlwind; — true 
effort, in fact, as of a captive struggling to free himself: that 
is Thought. In all ways we are ' to become perfect through 
suffering. ' — But, as I say, no work known to me is so elab- 
orated as this of Dante's. It has all been as if molten, in 
the hottest furnace of his soul. It had made him ' lean ' for 
many years. Not the general whole only; every compart- 
ment of it is worked-out, with intense earnestness, into 
truth, into clear visuality. Each answers to the other; each 
fits in its place, like a marble stone accurately hewn and 
polished. It is the soul of Dante, and in this the soul of the 
middle ages, rendered forever rhythmically visible there. 
No light task ; a right intense one : but a task which is done. 
Perhaps one would say, intensity, with the much that de- 
pends on it, is the prevailing character of Dante's genius. 



90 LECTURES ON HEROES 

Dante does not come before us as a large catholic mind; 
rather as a narrow, and even sectarian mind: it is partly 
the fruit of his age and position, but partly too of his own 
nature. His greatness has, in all senses, concentrated itself 
into fiery emphasis and depth. He is world-great not be- 
cause he is world-wide, but because he is world-deep. 
Through all objects he pierces as it were down into the heart 
of Being. I know nothing so intense as Dante. Consider, 
for example, to begin with the outermost development of 
his intensity, consider how he paints. He has a great power 
of vision; seizes the very type of a thing; presents that and 
nothing more. You remember that first view he gets of the 
Hall of Dite: red pinnacle, redhot cone of iron glowing 
through the dim immensity of gloom ; — so vivid, so distinct, 
visible at once and forever ! It is as an emblem of the whole 
genius of Dante. There is a brevity, an abrupt precision 
in him: Tacitus is not briefer, more condensed; and then 
in Dante it seems a natural condensation, spontaneous to 
the man. One smiting word; and then there is silence, 
nothing more said. His silence is more eloquent than 
words. It is strange with what a sharp decisive grace he 
snatches the true likeness of a matter : cuts into the matter 
as with a pen of fire. Plutus, the blustering giant, collapses 
at Virgil's rebuke; it is 'as the sails sink, the mast being 
suddenly broken. ' Or that poor Brunetto Latini, with the 
cotto aspetto, 'face baked/ parched brown and lean; and 
the ' fiery snow ' that falls on them there, a ' fiery snow with- 
out wind,' slow, deliberate, never-ending! Or the lids of 
those Tombs; square sarcophaguses, in that silent dim- 
burning Hall, each mth its Soul in torment; the lids laid 
open there; they are to be shut at the Day of Judgment, 
through Eternity. And how Farinata rises ; and how Cav- 
alcante falls — at hearing of his Son, and the past tense ' fue ' ! 
The very movements in Dante have something brief; swift, 
decisive, almost military. It is of the inmost essence of his 
genius this sort of painting. The fiery, swift Italian nature 
of the man, so silent, passionate, with its quick abrupt move- 
ments, its silent ' pale rages, ' speaks itself in these things. 



THE HERO AS POET . 91 

For though this of painting is one of the outermost de- 
velopments of a man, it comes Hke all else from thePessential 
faculty of him ; it is physiognomical of the whole man. Find 
a man whose words paint you a likeness, you have found 
a man worth something; mark his manner of doing it, as 
very characteristic of him. In the first place, he could not 
have discerned the object at all, or seen the vital type of it, 
unless he had, what we may call, sympathised witii it, — had 
sympathy in him to bestow on objects. He must have been 
sincere about it too ; sincere and sympathetic : a man with- 
out worth cannot give you the likeness of any object; he 
dwells in vague outwardness, fallacy and trivial hearsay 
about all objects. And indeed may we not say that intellect 
altogether expresses itself in this power of discerning what 
an object is? Whatsoever of faculty a man's mind may 
have will come out here. Is it even of business, a matter 
to be done? The gifted man is he who sees the essential 
point, and leaves all the rest aside as surplusage: it is his 
faculty too, the man of businesses faculty, that he discern 
the true likeness, not the false superficial one, of the thing 
he has got to work in. And how much of morality is in the 
kind of insight we get of anything; Hhe eye seeing in all 
' things what it brought with it the faculty of seeing ' ! To 
the mean eye all things are trivial, as certainly as to the 
jaundiced they are yellow. Raphael, the Painters tell us, 
is the best of all Portrait-painters withal. No mos'^t gifted 
eye can exhaust the significance of any object. In the com- 
monest human face there lies more than Raphael will take- 
away with him. 

Dante's painting is not graphic only, brief, true, and of a 
vividness as of fire in dark night; taken on the wider scale, 
it is everyway noble, and the outcome of a great soul. Fran- 
cesca and her Lover, what qualities in that ! A thing woven 
as out of rainbows, on a ground of eternal black. A small 
flute-voice of infinite wail speaks there, into our very heart 
of hearts. A touch of womanhood in it too : delta hella per- 
sona, che mi fu tolta; and how, even in the Pit of woe, it is a 
solace that he will never part from her! Saddest tragedy 



92 LECTURES ON HEROES 

in these alti guai. And the racking winds, in that aer hruno, 
whirl thftn away again, to wail forever ! — Strange to think : 
Dante was the friend of this poor Francesca's father; Fran- 
cesca herself may have sat upon the Poet's knee, as a bright 
innocent little child. Infinite pity, yet also infinite rigour 
of law: it is so Nature is made; it is so Dante discerned that 
she was made. What a paltry notion is that of his Divine 
Comedy^ s being a poor splenetic impotent terrestrial libel; 
putting those into Hell whom he could not be avenged-upon 
on earth ! I suppose if ever pity, tender as a mother's, was 
in the heart of any man, it was in Dante's. But a man who 
does not know rigour cannot pity either. His very pity will 
be cowardly, egoistic, — sentimentality, or little better. I 
know not in the world an affection equal to that of Dante. 
It is a tenderness, a trembling, longing, pitying love: like 
the wail of ^olean harps, soft, soft; like a child's young 
heart; — and then that stern, sore-saddened heart! These 
longings of his towards his Beatrice; their meeting together 
in the Paradiso; his gazing in her pure transfigured eyes, 
her that had been purified by death so long, separated from 
him so far : — one likens it to the song of angels ; it is among 
the purest utterances of affection, perhaps the very purest, 
that ever came out of a human soul. 

For the intense Dante is intense in all things; he has got 
into the essence of all. His intellectual insight as painter, 
on occasion too as reasoner, is but the result of*all other 
sorts of intensity. Morally great, above all, we must call 
him; it is the beginning of all. His scorn, his grief are 
as transcendent as his love; — as indeed, what are they but 
the inverse or converse of his love? 'A Dio spiacenti ed a' 
nemici sui, Hateful to God and to the enemies of God : ' lofty 
scorn, unappeasable silent reprobation and aversion; 'Non 
ragionam di lor, We will not speak of them, look only and 
pass.' Or think of this; 'They have not the hope to die, 
Non han speranza di morte. ' One day, it had risen sternly 
benign on the scathed heart of Dante, that he, wretched, 
never-resting, worn as he was, would full surely die; Hhat 
Destiny itself could not doom him not to die. ' Such words 



THE HERO AS POET 93 

are in this man. For rigour, earnestness and depth, he is 
not to be paralleled in the modern world ; to seek his parallel 
we must go into the Hebrew Bible, and live with the antique 
Prophets there. 

I do not agree with much modern criticism, in greatly- 
preferring the Inferno to the two other parts of the Divine 
Commedia. Such preference belongs, I imagine, to our gen- 
eral Byronism of taste, and is like to be a transient feeling. 
The Purgatorio and Paradiso, especially the former, one 
would almost say, is even more excellent than it. It is a 
noble thing that Purgatorio, ' Mountain of Purification ; ' an 
emblem of the noblest conception of that age. If Sin is so 
fatal, and Hell is and must be so rigorous, awful, yet in Re- 
pentance too is man purified; Repentance is the grand 
Christian act. It is beautiful how Dante works it out. The 
tremolar delV onde, that Hrembling' of the ocean- waves, 
under the first pure gleam of morning, dawning afar on the 
wandering Two, is as the type of an altered mood. Hope 
has now dawned ; never-dying Hope, if in company still with 
heavy sorrow. The obscure sojourn of daemons and repro- 
bate is underfoot; a soft breathing of penitence mounts 
higher and higher, to the Throne of Mercy itself. ^'Pray 
for me, " the denizens of that Mount of Pain all say to him. 
"Tell my Giovanna to pray for me, " my daughter Giovanna; 
*'I think her mother loves me no more!" They toil pain- 
fully up by that winding steep, 'bent-down like corbels of 
a building, ' some of them, — crushed-together so ' for the sin 
of pride ; ' yet nevertheless in years, in ages and seons, they 
shall have reached the top, which is Heaven's gate, and by 
Mercy shall have been admitted in. The joy too of all, when 
one has prevailed; the whole Mountain shakes with joy, and 
a psalm of praise rises, when one soul has perfected re- 
pentance and got its sin and misery left behind ! I call all 
this a noble embodiment of a true noble thought. 

But indeed the Three compartments mutually support 
one another, are indispensable to one another. The Para- 
diso, a kind of inarticulate music to me, is the redeeming side 
of the Inferno; the Inferno without it were untrue. All 



94 LECTURES ON HEROES 

three make-up the true Unseen World, as figured in the 
Christianity of the Middle Ages ; a thing forever memorable, 
forever true in the essence of it, to all men. It was perhaps 
delineated in no human soul with such depth of veracity as 
in this of Dante's; a man sent to sing it, to keep it long 
memorable. Very notable with what brief simplicity he 
passes out of the every-day reality, into the Invisible one; 
and in the second or third stanza, we find ourselves in the 
World of Spirits ; and dwell there, as among things palpable, 
indubitable ! To Dante they were so ; the real world, as it 
is called, and its facts, was but the threshold to an infinitely 
higher Fact of a World. At bottom the one was as preter- 
natural as the other. Has not each man a soul? He will 
not only be a spirit, but is one. To the earnest Dante it is 
all one visible Fact ; he believes it, sees it ; is the Poet of it 
in virtue of that. Sincerity, I say again, is the saving merit, 
now as always. 

Dante's Hell, Purgatory, Paradise, are a symbol withal, 
an emblematic representation of his Belief about this Uni- 
verse: — some Critic in a future age, like those Scandinavian 
ones the other day, who has ceased altogether to think as 
Dante did, may find this too all an ^Allegory, ' perhaps an 
idle Allegory ! It is a sublime embodiment, or sublimest, of 
the soul of Christianity. It expresses, as in huge worldwide 
architectural emblems, how the Christian Dante felt Good 
and Evil to be the two polar elements of this Creation, on 
which it all turns ; that these two differ not by preferahility 
of one to the other, but by incompatibihty absolute and 
infinite; that the one is excellent and high as light and 
Heaven, the other hideous, black as Gehenna and the Pit of 
Hell! Everlasting Justice, yet with Penitence, with ever- 
lasting Pity, — all Christianism, as Dante and the Middle 
Ages had it, is emblemed here. Emblemed: and yet, as I 
urged the other day, with what entire truth of purpose; 
how unconscious of any embleming! Hell, Purgatory, 
Paradise : these things were not fashioned as emblems ; was 
there, in our Modern European Mind, any thought at all of 
their being emblems! Were they not indubitable awful 



THE HERO AS POET 95 

facts ; the whole heart of man taking them for practically 
true, all Nature everywhere confirming them? So is it 
always in these things. Men do not believe an Allegory. 
The future Critic, whatever his new thought may be, who 
considers this of Dante to have been all got-up as an Allegory, 
will commit one sore mistake ! — Paganism we recognised as 
a veracious expression of the earnest awe-struck feeling of 
man towards the Universe; veracious, true once, and still 
not without worth for us. But mark here the difference of 
Paganism and Christianism ; one great difference. Pagan- 
ism emblemed chiefly the Operations of Nature; the des- 
tinies, efforts, combinations, vicissitudes of things and men 
in this world; Christianism emblemed the Law of Human 
Duty, the Moral Law of Man. One was for the sensuous 
nature:^ a rude helpless utterance of the first Thought of 
men, — the chief recognised virtue. Courage, Superiority to 
Fear. The other was not for the sensuous nature, but for 
the moral. What a progress is here, if in that one respect 
only ! — 

And so in this Dante, as we said, had ten silent centuries 
in a very strange way, found a voice. The Divina Com-, 
media is of Dante's writing; yet in truth it belongs to ten 
Christian centuries, only the finishing of it is Dante's. So 
always. The craftsmen there, the smith with that metal of 
his, with these tools, with these cunning methods, — how 
little of all he does is properly his work ! All past inventive 
men work there with him; — as indeed with all of us, in all 
things. Dante is the spokesman of the Middle Ages; the 
Thought they lived by stands here, in everlasting music. 
These sublime ideas of his, terrible and beautiful, are the 
fruit of the Christian Meditation of all the good men who 
had gone before him. Precious they; but also is not he 
precious? Much, had not he spoken, would have been 
dumb; not dead, yet living voiceless. 

On the whole, is it not an utterance, this mystic Song, at 
once of one of the greatest human souls, and of the highest 
thing that Europe had hitherto realised for itself? Christ- 



96 LECTURES ON HEROES 

ianism, as Dante sings it, is another than Paganism in the 
rude Norse mind ; another than ' Bastard Christianism ' half- 
articulately spoken in the Arab Desert seven-hundred years 
before ! — The noblest idea made real hitherto among men, is 
sung, and emblemed-forth abidingly, by one of the noblest 
men. In the one sense and in the other, are we not right 
glad to possess it? As I calculate, it may last yet for long 
thousands of years. For the thing that is uttered from the 
inmost parts of a man's soul, differs altogether from what 
is uttered by the outer part. The outer is of the day, under 
the empire of mode; the outer passes away, in swift endless 
changes; the inmost is the same yesterday, today and for- 
ever. True souls, in all generations of the world, who look 
on this Dante, will find a brotherhood in him; the deep sin- 
cerity of his thoughts, his woes and hopes, will speak like- 
wise to their sincerity; they will feel that this Dante too 
was a brother. Napoleon in Saint-Helena is charmed with 
the genial veracity of old Homer. The oldest Hebrew 
Prophet, under a vesture the most diverse from ours, does 
yet, because he speaks from the heart of man, speak to all 
men's hearts. It is the one sole secret of continuing long 
memorable. Dante, for depth of sincerity, is like an antique 
Prophet too; his words, like theirs, come from his very 
heart. One need not wonder if it were predicted that his 
Poem might be the most enduring thing our Europe has yet 
made ; for nothing so endures as a truly spoken word. All 
cathedrals, pontificalities, brass and stone, and outer ar- 
rangements never so lasting, are brief in comparison to an 
unfathomable heart-song like this: one feels as if it might 
survive, still of importance to men, when these had all sunk 
into new irrecognisable combinations, and had ceased in- 
dividually to be. Europe has made much; great cities, 
great empires, encyclopaedias, creeds, bodies of opinion and 
practice: but it has made little of the class of Dante's 
Thought. Homer yet is, veritably present face to face with 
every open soul of us ; and Greece, where is it f Desolate for 
thousands of years; away, vanished; a bewildered heap of 
stones and rubbish, the life and existence of it all gone. 



THE HERO AS POET 97 

Like a dream ; like the dust of King Agamemnon ! Greece 
was ; Greece, except in the words it spoke, is not. 

The uses of this Dante? We will not say much about his 
'uses.' A human soul who has once got into that primal 
element of Song, and sung-forth fitly somewhat therefrom, 
has worked in the depths of our existence; feeding through 
long times the life-roote of all excellent human things what- 
soever, — in a way that ' utilities ' will not succeed well in 
calculating ! We will not estimate the Sun by the quantity 
of gas-light it saves us ; Dante shall be invaluable, or of no 
value. One remark I may make : the contrast in this respect 
between the Hero-Poet and the Hero-Prophet. In a hun- 
dred years, Mahomet, as we saw, had his Arabians at Gre- 
nada and at Delhi; Dante's Italians seem to be yet very 
much where they were. Shall we say, then, Dante's effect 
on the world was small in comparison? Not so: his arena 
is far more restricted; but also it is far nobler, clearer; — 
perhaps not less but more important. Mahomet speaks to 
great masses of men, in the coarse dialect adapted to such; 
a dialect filled with inconsistencies, crudities, follies: on 
the great masses alone can he act, and there with good and 
with evil strangely blended. Dante speaks to the noble, the 
pure and great, in all times and places. Neither does he 
grow obsolete, as the other does. Dante burns as a pure 
star, fixed there in the firmament, at which the great and 
the high of all ages kindle themselves: he is the possession 
of all the chosen of the world for uncounted time. Dante, 
one calculates, may long survive Mahomet. In this way 
the balance may be made straight a^in. 

But, at any rate, it is not by what is called their effect on 
the world by what we can judge of their effect there, that 
a man and his work are measured. Effect? Influence? 
Utility? Let a man do his work; the fruit of it is the care 
of Another than he. It will grow its own fruit ; and whether 
embodied in Caliph Thrones and Arabian Conquests, so that 
it ' fills all Morning and Evening Newspapers, ' and all His- 
tories, which are a kind of distilled Newspapers ; or not em- 
bodied so at all; — what matters that? That is not the real 
7 



98 LECTURES ON HEROES 

fruit of it! The Arabian Caliph, in so far only as he did 
something, was something. If the great Cause of Man, and 
Man's work in God's Earth, got no furtherance from the 
Arabian Caliph, then no matter how many scimetars he 
drew, how many gold piasters pocketed, and what uproar 
and blaring he made in this world, — he was but a loud- 
sounding inanity and futility; at bottom, he was not at all. 
Let us honour the great empire of Silence, once more ! The 
boundless treasury which we do not jingle in our pockets, or 
count up and present before men! It is perhaps, of all 
things, the usefulest for each of us to do, in these loud 
times. 

As Dante, the Italian man, was sent into our world to 
embody musically the Religion of the Middle Ages, the 
Religion of our Modern Europe, its Inner Life; so Shak- 
speare, we may say, embodies for us the Outer Life of our 
Europe as developed then, its chivalries, courtesies, hu- 
mours, ambitions, what practical way of thinking, acting, 
looking at the world, men then had. As in Homer we may 
still construe Old Greece ; so in Shakspeare and Dante, after 
thousands of years, what our modern Europe was, in Faith 
and in Practice, will still be legible. Dante has given us the 
Faith or soul ; Shakspeare, in a not less noble way, has given 
us the Practice or body. This latter also we were to have; 
a man was sent for it, the man Shakspeare. Just when 
that chivalry way of life had reached its last finish, and was 
on the point of breaking down into slow or swift dissolution, 
as we now see it everyxt^here, this other sovereign Poet, with 
his seeing eye, mth his perennial singing voice, was sent to 
take note of it, to give long-enduring record of it. Two fit 
men: Dante, deep, fierce as the central fire of the world; 
Shakspeare, wide, placid, far-seeing, as the Sun, the upper 
light of the world. Italy produced the one world- voice; we 
English had the honour of producing the other. ■ 

Curious enough how, as if it were by mere accident, this 
man came to us. I think always, so great, quiet, complete 
and self-sufficing is this Shakspeare, had the Warwickshire 



THE HERO AS POET 99 

Squire not prosecuted him for deer-stealing, we had perhaps 
never heard of him as a Poet ! The woods and skies, the rus- 
tic Life of Man in Stratford there, had been enough for this 
man! But indeed that strange outbudding of our whole 
English Existence, which we call the Elizabethan Era, did 
it not too come as of its own accord? The 'Tree Igdrasil' 
buds and withers by its own laws, — too deep for our scan- 
ning. Yet it does bud and wither, and every bough and 
leaf of it is there j by fixed eternal laws; not a Sir Thomas 
Lucy but comes at the hour fit for him. Curious, I say, and 
not sufficiently considered: how everything does cooperate 
with all ; not a leaf rotting on the highway but is indissoluble 
portion of solar and stellar systems; no thought, word or 
act of man but has sprung withal out of all men, and works 
sooner or later, recognisably or irrecognisably, on all men! 
It is all a Tree: circulation of sap and influences, mutual 
communication of every minutest leaf with the lowest talon 
of a root, with every other greatest and minutest portion of 
the whole. The Tree Igdrasil, that has its roots down in the 
kingdoms of Hela and Death, and whose boughs overspread 
the highest Heaven! — 

In some sense it may be said that this glorious Eliza- 
bethan Era with its Shakspeare, as the outcome and flower- 
age of all which had preceded it, is itself attributable to the 
Catholicism of the Middle Ages. The Christian Faith, which 
was the theme of Dante's Song, had produced this Practical 
Life which Shakspeare was to sing. For Religion then, as it 
now and always is, was the soul of Practice; the primary 
vital fact in men's life. And remark here, as rather curious, 
that Middle- Age Catholicism was abolished, so far as Acts 
of Parliament could aboHsh it, before Shakspeare, the no- 
blest product of it, made his appearance. He did make his 
appearance nevertheless. Nature at her own time, with 
Catholicism or what else might be necessary, sent him forth; 
taking small thought of Acts of Parhament. King-Henrys, 
Queen-Elizabeths go their way; and Nature too goes hers. 
Acts of Parliament, on the whole, are small, notwithstand- 
ing the noise they make. What Act of Parliament, debate 

LOFa 



100 LECTURES ON HEROES 

at St. Stephen's, on the hustings or elsewhere, was it that 
brought this Shakspeare into being? No dining at Free- 
masons' Tavern, opening subscription-lists, selling of shares, 
and infinite other jangling and true or false endeavouring! 
This EHzabethan Era, and all its nobleness and blessedness, 
came without proclamation, preparation of ours. Priceless 
Shakspeare was the free gift of Nature; given altogether 
silently; — received altogether silently, as if it had been a 
thing of little account. And yet, very literally, it is a price- 
less thing. One should look at that side of matters too. 

Of this Shakspeare of ours, perhaps the opinion one 
sometimes hears a little idolatrously expressed is, in fact, 
the right one; I think the best judgment not of this country 
only, but of Europe at large, is slowly pointing to the con- 
clusion. That Shakspeare is the chief of all Poets hitherto; 
the greatest intellect who, in our recorded world, has left 
record of himself in the way of Literature. On the whole, 
I know not such a power of vision, such a faculty of thought, 
if we take all the characters of it, in any other man. Such 
a calmness of depth; placid joyous strength; all things 
imaged in that great soul of his so true and clear, as in a 
tranquil unfathomable sea! It has been said, that in the 
constructing of Shakspeare's Dramas there is, apart from 
all other 'faculties' as they are called, an understanding 
manifested, equal to that in Bacon's Novum Organum. That 
is true; and it is not a truth that strikes every one. It 
would become more apparent if we tried, any of us for him- 
self, how, out of Shakspeare's dramatic materials, we could 
fashion such a result! The built house seems all so fit, — 
every way as it should be, as if it came there by its own law 
and the nature of things, — we forget the rude disorderly 
quarry it was shaped from. The very perfection of the 
house, as if Nature herself had made it, hides the builder's 
merit. Perfect, more perfect than any other man, we may 
call Shakspeare in this : he discerns, knows as by instinct, 
what condition he works under, what his materials are, what 
his own force and its relation to them is. It is not a trans- 
itory glance of insight that will suffice; it is deliberate illu- 



THE HERO AS POET 101 

mination of the whole matter; it is a calmly seeing eye; a 
great intellect, in short. How a man, of some wide thing 
that he has witnessed, will construct a narrative, what kind 
of picture and delineation he will give of it, — is the best 
measure you could get of what intellect is in the man. 
Which circumstance is vital and shall stand prominent; 
which unessential, fit to be suppressed; where is the true 
beginning, the true sequence and ending? To find out this, 
you task the whole force of insight that is in the man. He 
must understand the thing; according to the depth of his 
understanding will the fitness of his answer be. You will 
try him so. Does like join itself to like; does the spirit of 
method stir in that confusion, so that its embroilment be- 
comes order? Can the man say, Fiat lux, Let there be light; 
and out of chaos make a world? Precisely as there is light 
in himself^ will he accomplish this. 

Or indeed we may say again, it is in what I call Portrait- 
painting, delineating of men and things, especially of men, 
that Shakspeare is great. All the greatness of the man 
comes out decisively here. It is unexampled, I think, that 
calm creative perspicacity of Shakspeare. The thing he 
looks at reveals not this or that face of it, but its inmost 
heart, and generic secret : it dissolves itself as in light before 
him, so that he discerns the perfect structure of it. Crea- 
tive, we said: poetic creation, what is this too but seeing 
the thing sufficiently? The word that will describe the 
thing, follows of itself from such clear intense sight of the 
thing. And is not Shakspeare's morality, his valour, can- 
dour, tolerance, truthfulness ; his whole victorious strength 
and greatness, which can triumph over such obstructions, 
visible there too? Great as the world! No twisted, poor 
convex-concave mirror, reflecting all objects with its own 
convexities and concavities; a perfectly level mirror; — that 
is to say withal, if we will understand it, a man justly related 
to all things and men, a good man. It is truly a lordly 
spectacle how this great soul takes-in all kinds of men and 
objects, a Falstaff, an Othello, a Juliet, a Coriolanus; sets 
them all forth to us in their round completeness; loving, just, 



102 LECTURES ON HEROES 

the equal brother of all. Novum Organum, and all the 
intellect you will find in Bacon, is of a quite secondary order; 
earthy, material, poor in comparison with this. Among 
modern men, one finds, in strictness, almost nothing of the 
same rank. Goethe alone, since the days of Shakspeare, 
reminds me of it. Of him too you say that he saw the ob- 
ject ; you may say what he himself says of Shakspeare : ' His 
' characters are like watches with dial-plates of transparent 
' crystal; they show you the hour like others, and the inward 
'mechanism also is all visible.' 

The seeing eye ! It is this that discloses the inner har- 
mony of things; what Nature meant, what musical idea 
Nature has wrapped-up in these often rough embodiments. 
Something she did mean. To the seeing eye that something 
were discernible. Are they base, miserable things? You 
can laugh over them, you can weep over them; you can in 
some way or other generally relate yourself to them; — ^you 
can, at lowest, hold your peace about them, turn away your 
own and others' face from them, till the hour come for prac- 
tically exterminating and extinguishing them ! At bottom, 
it is the Poet's first gift, as it is all men's, that he have in- 
tellect enough. He will be a Poet if he have: a Poet in 
word; or failing that, perhaps still better, a Poet in act. 
Whether he write at all ; and if so, whether in prose or in 
verse, will depend on accidents: who knows on what ex- 
tremely trivial accidents, — ^perhaps on his having had a 
singing-master, on his being taught to sing in his boyhood ! 
But the faculty which enables him to discern the inner heart 
of things, and the harmony that dwells there (for whatsoever 
exists has a harmony in the heart of it, or it would not hold 
together and exist), is not the result of habits or accidents, 
but the gift of Nature herself; the primary outfit for a 
Heroic Man in what sort soever. To the Poet, as to every 
other, we say first of all, See. If you cannot do that, it is 
of no use to keep stringing rhymes together, jingling sen- 
sibilities against each other, and name yourself a Poet ; there 
is no hope for you. If you can, there is, in prose or verse, 
in action or speculation, all manner of hope. The crabbed 



THE HERO AS POET 103 

old Schoolmaster used to ask, when they brought him a new 
pupil, ^' But are ye sure he's not a dunce ? " Why, really one 
might ask the same thing, in regard to every man proposed 
for whatsoever function ; and consider it as the one inquiry 
needful: Are ye sure he's not a dunce? There is, in this 
world, no other entirely fatal person. 

For, in fact, I say the degree of vision that dwells in a 
man is a correct measure of the man. If called to define 
Shakspeare's faculty, I should say superiority of Intellect, 
and think I had included all under that. What indeed are 
faculties? We talk of faculties as if they were distinct, 
things separable; as if a man had intellect, imagination, 
fancy, &c., as he has hands, feet and arms. That is a capi- 
tal error. Then again, we hear of a man's 'intellectual 
nature, ' and of his ' moral nature, ' as if these again were 
divisible, and existed apart. Necessities of language do per- 
haps prescribe such forms of utterance; we must speak, I 
am aware, in that way, if we are to speak at all. But words 
ought not to harden into things for us. It seems to me, our 
apprehension of this matter is, for most part, radically 
falsified thereby. We ought to know withal, and to keep for- 
ever in mind, that these divisions are at bottom but names; 
that man's spiritual nature, the vital Force which dwells in 
him, is essentially one and indivisible; that what we call 
imagination, fancy, understanding, and so forth, are but 
different figures of the same Power of Insight, all indisso- 
lubly connected with each other, physiognomically related; 
that if we knew one of them, we might know all of them. 
Morality itself, what we call the moral quality of a man, 
what is this but another side of the one vital Force whereby 
he is and works? All that a man does is physiognomical 
of him. You may see how a man would fight, by the way 
in which he sings ; his courage, or want of courage, is visible 
in the word he utters, in the opinion he has formed, no less 
than in the stroke he strikes. He is one; and preaches the 
same Self abroad in all these ways. 

Without hands a man might have feet, and could still 
walk : but, consider it, — without morality, intellect were im- 



104 LECTURES ON HEROES 

possible for him ; a thoroughly immoral man could not know 
anything at all ! To know a thing, what we can call know- 
ing, a man must first love the thing, sympathise with it : that 
is, be virtuously related to it. If he have not the justice to 
put down his own selfishness at every turn, the courage to 
stand by 'the dangerous-true at every turn, how shall he 
know? His virtues, all of them, will lie recorded in his 
knowledge. Nature, with her truth, remains to the bad, to 
the selfish and the pusillanimous forever a sealed book : what 
such can know of Nature is mean, superficial, small; . for the 
uses of the day merely. — But does not the very Fox know 
something of Nature? Exactly so: it knows where the 
geese lodge! The human Reynard, very frequent every- 
where in the world, what more does he know but this and 
the like of this? Nay, it should be considered too, that if 
the Fox had not a certain vulpine morality, he could not even 
know where the geese were, or get at the geese ! If he spent 
his time in splenetic atrabiliar reflections on his own misery, 
his ill usage by Nature, Fortune and other Foxes, and so 
forth; and had not courage, promptitude, practicality, and 
other suitable vulpine gifts and graces, he would catch no 
geese. We may say of the Fox too, that his morality and 
insight are of the same dimensions; different faces of the 
same internal unity of vulpine life ! — These things are worth 
stating; for the contrary of them acts with manifold very 
baleful perversion, in this time : what limitations, modifica- 
tions they require, your own candour will supply. 

If I say, therefore, that Shakspeare is the greatest of 
Intellects, I have said all concerning him. But there is more 
in Shakspeare's intellect than we have yet seen. It is what 
I call an unconscious intellect; there is more virtue in it 
than he himself is aware of. Novahs beautifully remarks of 
him, that those Dramas of his are Products of Nature too, 
deep as Nature herself. I find a great truth in this saying. 
Shakspeare's Art is not Artifice; the noblest worth of it is 
not there by plan or precontrivance. It grows-up from the 
deeps of Nature, through this noble sincere soul, who is a 
voice of Nature. The latest generations of men mil find 



THE HERO AS POET 105 

new meanings in Shakspeare, new elucidations of their own 
human being ; ' new harmonies with the infinite structure of 
'the Universe; concurrences with later ideas, affinities with 
' the higher powers and senses of man. ' This well deserves 
meditating. It is Nature's highest reward to a true simple 
great soul, that he get thus to be a part of herself. Such a 
man's works, whatsoever he with utmost conscious exertion 
and forethought shall accomplish, grow up withal uncon- 
sciously, from the unknown deeps in him; — as the oak-tree 
grows from the Earth's bosom, as the mountains and waters 
shape themselves; with a symmetry grounded on Nature's 
own laws, conformable to all Truth whatsoever. How much 
in Shakspeare hes hid; his sorrows, his silent struggles known 
to himself; much that was not known at all, not speakable 
at all: like roots, like sap and forces working underground! 
Speech is great; but Silence is greater. 

Withal the joyful tranquillity of this man is notable. I 
will not blame Dante for his misery: it is as battle without 
victory; but true battle, — the first, indispensable thing. 
Yet I call Shakspeare greater than Dante, in that he fought 
truly, and did conquer. Doubt it not, he had his own sor- 
rows : those Sonnets of his will even testify expressly in what 
deep waters he had waded, and swum struggling for his life ; 
— as what man like him ever failed to have to do? It 
seems to me a heedless notion, our common one, that he sat 
like a bird on the bough; and sang forth, free and offhand, 
never knowing the troubles of other men. Not so; with no 
man is it so. How could a man travel forward from rustic 
deer-poaching to such tragedy-writing, and not fall-in with 
sorrows by the way? Or, still better, how could a man 
delineate a Hamlet, a Coriolanus, a Macbeth, so many suf- 
fering heroic hearts, if his own heroic heart had never suf- 
fered? — And now, in contrast with all this, observe his 
mirthfulness, his genuine overflowing love of laughter ! You 
would say, in no point does he exaggerate but only in laugh- 
ter. Fiery objurgations, words that pierce and burn, are to 
be found in Shakspeare; yet he is always in measure here; 
never what Johnson would remark as a specially 'good 



106 LECTURES ON HEROES 

hater. ' But his laughter seems to pour from him in floods ; 
he heaps all manner of ridiculous nicknames on the butt he 
is bantering, tumbles and tosses him in all sorts of horse- 
play; you would say, with his whole heart laughs. And 
then, if not always the finest, it is always a genial laughter. 
Not at mere weakness, at misery or poverty; never. No 
man who can laugh, what we call laughing, will laugh at 
these things. It is some poor character only desiring to 
laugh, and have the credit of wit, that does so. Laughter 
means sympathy ; good laughter is not ' crackling of thorns 
under the pot.' Even at stupidity and pretension this 
Shakspeare does not laugh otherwise than genially. Dog- 
berry and Verges tickle our very hearts; and we dismiss 
them covered with explosions of laughter: but we like the 
poor fellows only the better for our laughing; and hope they 
will get on well there, and continue Presidents of the City- 
watch. Such laughter, like sunshine on the deep sea, is 
very beautiful to me. 

We have no room to speak of Shakspeare's individual 
works ; though perhaps there is much still waiting to be said 
on that head. Had we, for instance, all his plays reviewed 
as Hamlet, in Wilhelm Meister, is! A thing which might, 
one day, be done. August Wilhelm Schlegel has a remark 
on his Historical Plays, Henry Fifth and the others, which 
is worth remembering. He calls them a kind of National 
Epic. Marlborough, you recollect, said, he knew no English 
History but what he had learned from Shakspeare. There 
are really, if we look to it, few as memorable Histories. The 
great salient points are admirably seized; all rounds itself 
off, into a kind of rhythmic coherence; it is, as Schlegel says, 
epic; — as indeed all delineation by a great thinker will be. 
There are right beautiful things in those Pieces, which indeed 
together form one beautiful thing. That battle of Agin- 
court strikes me as one of the most perfect things, in its sort, 
we anywhere have of Shakspeare's. The description of the 
two hosts: the wornout, jaded English; the dread hour, 
big with destiny, when the battle shall begin ; and then that 



THE HERO AS POET 107 

deathless valour : " Ye good yeomen, whose limbs were made 
in England!" There is a noble Patriotism in it, — far other 
than the indifference' you sometimes hear ascribed to 
Shakspeare. A true English heart breathes, calm and 
strong, through the whole business; not boisterous, pro- 
trusive ; all the better for that. There is a sound in it like 
the ring of steel. This man too had a right stroke in him, 
had it come to that ! 

But I will say, of Shakspeare's works generally, that we 
have no full impress of him there ; even as full as we have 
of many men. His works are so many windows, through 
which we see a glimpse of the world that was in him. All 
his works seem, comparatively speaking, cursory, imperfect, 
written under cramping circumstances; giving only here 
and there a note of the full utterance of the man. Passages 
there are that come upon you like splendour out of Heaven; 
burst of radiance, illuminating the very heart of the thing: 
you say, ''That is true, spoken once and forever; where- 
soever and whensoever there is an open human soul, that 
will be recognised as true ! " Such bursts, however, make us 
feel that the surrounding matter is not radiant ; that it is, 
in part, temporary, conventional. Alas, Shakspeare had to 
write for the Globe Playhouse: his great soul had to crush 
itself, as it could, into that and no other mould. It was 
with him, then, as it is with us all. No man works save 
under conditions. The sculptor cannot set his own free 
Thought before us; but his Thought as he could translate 
it into the stone that was given, with the tools that were 
given. Disjecta membra are all that we find of any Poet, or 
of any man. 

Whoever looks inteUigently at this Shakspeare may 
recognise that he too was a Prophet, in his way; of an in- 
sight analogous to the Prophetic, though he took it up in 
another strain. Nature seemed to this man also divine; 
t^nspeakable, deep as Tophet, high as Heaven : ' We are such 
stuff as Dreams are made of ! ' That scroll in Westminster 
Abbey, which few read with understanding, is of the depth 



108 LECTURES ON HEROES 

of any seer. But the man sang; did not preach, except 
musically. We called Dante the melodious Priest of Middle- 
Age Catholicism. May we not call Shakspeare the still more 
melodious Priest of a true Catholicism, the 'Universal 
Church' of the Future and of all times? No narrow super- 
stition, harsh asceticism, intolerance, fanatical fierceness or 
perversion: a Revelation, so far as it goes, that such a 
thousandfold hidden beauty and divineness dwells in all 
Nature ; which let all men worship as they can ! We may say 
without offence, that there rises a kind of universal Psalm 
out of this Shakspeare too; not unfit to make itself heard 
among the still more sacred Psalms. Not in disharmony 
with these, if we understood them, but in harmony ! — I can- 
not call this Shakspeare a ' Sceptic, ' as some do ; his indiffer- 
ence to the creeds and theological quarrels of his time mis- 
leading them. No: neither unpatriotic, though he says 
little about his Patriotism; nor sceptic, though he says little 
about his Faith. Such 'indifference' was the fruit of his 
greatness withal: his whole heart was in his own grand 
sphere of worship (we may call it such) ; these other con- 
troversies, vitally important to other men, were not vital to 
him. 

But call it worship, call it what you will, is it not a right 
glorious thing, and set of things, this that Shakspeare has 
brought us? For myself, I feel that there is actually a kind 
of sacredness in the fact of such a man being sent into this 
Earth. Is he not an eye to us all; a blessed heaven-sent 
Bringer of Light? — And, at bottom, was it not perhaps far 
better that this Shakspeare, everyway an unconscious man, 
was conscious of no Heavenly message? He did not feel, 
like Mahomet, because he saw into those internal Splen- 
dours, that he specially was the ' Prophet of God : ' and was 
he not greater than Mahomet in that? Greater; and also, 
if we compute strictly, as we did in Dante's case, more suc- 
cessful. It was intrinsically an error that notion of Ma- 
homet's, of his supreme Prophethood; and has come down 
to us inextricably involved in error to this day; dragging 
along with it such a coil of fables^ impurities, intolerances, as 



THE HERO AS POET ■ 109 

makes it a questionable step for me here and now to say, 
as I have done, that Mahomet was a true Speaker at all, and 
not rather an ambitious charlatan, perversity and simul- 
acrum; no Speaker, but a Babbler! Even in Arabia, as I 
compute, Mahomet will have exhausted himself and become 
obsolete, while this Shakspeare, this Dante may still be 
young; — while this Shakspeare may still pretend to be a 
Priest of Mankind, of Arabia as of other places, for un- 
limited periods to come ! 

Compared with any speaker or singer one knows, even 
with iEschylus or Homer, why should he not, for veracity 
and universality, last like them? He is sincere as they; 
reaches deep down like them, to the universal and perennial. 
But as for Mahomet, I think it had been better for him not 
to be so conscious! Alas, poor Mahomet; all that he was 
conscious of was a mere error; a futility and triviality, — as 
indeed such ever is. The truly great in him too was the un- 
conscious: that he was a wild Arab hon of the desert, and. 
did speak-out with that great thunder- voice of his, not by 
words which he thought to be great, but by actions, by feel- 
ings, by a history which were great ! His Koran has become 
a stupid piece of prolix absurdity ; we do not believe, like 
him, that God wrote that! The Great Man here too, as 
always, is a Force of Nature: whatsoever is truly great in 
him springs-up from the inarticulate deeps. 

Well : this is our poor Warwickshire Peasant, who rose to 
be Manager of a Playhouse, so that he could live without 
begging; whom the Earl of Southampton cast some kind 
glances on; whom Sir Thomas Lucy, many thanks to him, 
was for sending to the Treadmill ! We did not account him 
a god, like Odin, while he dwelt with us; — on which point 
there were much to be said. But I will say rather, or repeat : 
In spite of the sad state Hero-worship now lies in, consider 
what this Shakspeare has actually become among us. Which 
Englishman we ever made, in this land of ours, which million 
of Englishmen, would we not give-up rather than the Strat- 
ford Peasant? There is no regiment of highest Dignitaries 



110 LECTURES ON HEROES 

that we would sell him for. He is the grandest thing we 
have yet done. For our honour among foreign nations, as 
an ornament to our English Household, what item is there 
that we would not surrender rather than him? Consider 
now, if they asked us. Will you give-up your Indian Empire 
or your Shakspeare, you English; never have had any 
Indian Empire, or never have had any Shakspeare? Really 
it were a grave question. Official persons would answer 
doubtless in official language; but we, for our part too, 
should not we be forced to answer: Indian Empire, or no 
Indian Empire ; we cannot do without Shakspeare ! Indian 
Empire will go, at any rate, some day; but this Shakspeare 
does not go, he lasts forever with us; we cannot give-up our 
Shakspeare ! 

Nay, apart from spiritualities; and considering him 
merely as a real, marketable, tangibly-useful possession. 
England, before long, this Island of ours, mil hold but a 
small fraction of the English : in America, in New Holland, 
east and west to the very Antipodes, there will be a Saxon- 
dom covering great spaces of the Globe. And now, what is 
it that can keep all these together into virtually one Nation, 
so that they do not fall-out and fight, but live at peace, in 
brotherlike intercourse, helping one another? This is justly 
regarded as the greatest practical problem, the thing all 
manner of sovereignties and governments are here to accom- 
plish: what is it that will accomplish this? Acts of Parlia- 
ment, administrative prime-ministers cannot. America is 
parted from us, so far as Parliament could part it. Call it 
not fantastic, for there is much reality in it: Here, I say, is 
an English King, whom no time or chance. Parliament or 
combination of Parliaments, can dethrone! This King 
Shakspeare, does not he shine, in crowned sovereignty, over 
us all, as the noblest, gentlest, yet strongest of rallying-signs ; 
mdestructible ; really more valuable in that point of view 
than any other means or appliance whatsoever? We can 
fancy him as radiant aloft over all the Nations of English- 
men, a thousand years hence. From Paramatta, from New 
York, wheresoever, under what sort of Parish-Constable 



THE HERO AS POET 111 

soever, English men and women are, they will say to one 
another: "Yes, this Shakspeare is ours; we produced him, 
we speak and think by him; we are of one blood and kind 
with him. " The most common-sense politician, too, if he 
pleases, may think of that. 

Yes, truly, it is a great thing for a Nation that it get an 
articulate voice ; that it produce a man who will speak-forth 
melodiously what the heart of it means ! Italy, for example, 
poor Italy lies dismembered, scattered asunder, not appear- 
ing in any protocol or treaty as a unity at all ; yet the noble 
Italy is actually one: Italy produced its Dante; Italy can 
speak! The Czar of all the Russias, he is strong, with so 
many bayonets, Cossacks and cannons; and does a great 
feat in keeping such a. tract of Earth politically together; 
but he cannot yet speak. Something great in him, but it is 
a dumb greatness. He has had no voice of genius, to be 
heard of all men and times. He must learn to speak. He 
is a great dumb monster hitherto. His cannons and Cos- 
sacks will all have rusted into nonentity, while that Dante's 
voice is still audible. The Nation that has a Dante is 
bound together as no dumb Russia can be. — We must here 
end what we had to say of the Hero-Poet. 



LECTURE IV. 

THE HERO AS PRIEST. LUTHER; REFORMATION: KNOX; 

PURITANISM. 

[Friday, 15th May 1840.] 

Our present discourse is to be of the Great Man as Priest. 
We have repeatedly endeavoured to explain that all sorts 
of Heroes are intrinsically of the same material; that given 
a great soul, open to the Divine Significance of Life, then 
there is given a man fit to speak of this, to sing of this, to 
fight and work for this, in a great, victorious, enduring man- 
ner; there is given a Hero, — the outward shape of whom will 
depend on the time and the environment he finds himself 
in. The Priest too, as I understand it, is a kind of Prophet ; 
in him too there is required to be a light of inspiration, as we 
must name it. He presides over the worship of the people ; 
is the Uniter of them with the Unseen Holy. He is the 
Spiritual Captain of the people ; as the Prophet is their spir- 
itual King with many captains: he guides them heaven- 
ward, by wise guidance through this Earth and its work. 
The ideal of him is, that he too be what we can call a voice 
from the unseen Heaven ; interpreting, even as the Prophet 
did, and in a more familiar manner unfolding the same to 
men. The unseen Heaven, — the 'open secret of the Uni- 
verse, ' — which so few have an eye for! He is the Prophet 
shorn of his more awful splendour; burning with mild 
equable radiance, as the enlightener of daily life. This, I 
say, is the ideal of a Priest. So in old times; so in these, 
and in all times. One knows very well that, in reducing 
ideals to practice, great latitude of tolerance is needful ; very 
great. But a Priest who is not this at all, who does not any 

112 



THE HERO AS PRIEST 113 

longer aim or try to be this, is a character — of whom we had 
rather not speak in this place. 

Luther and Knox were by express vocation Priests, and 
did faithfully perform that function in its common sense. 
Yet it will suit us better here to consider them chiefly in 
their historical character, rather as Reformers than Priests. 
There have been other Priests perhaps equally notable, in 
calmer times, for doing faithfully the office of a Leader of 
Worship; bringing down, by faithful heroism in that kind, 
a light from Heaven into the daily life of their people ; lead- 
ing them forward, as under God's guidance, in the way 
wherein they were to go. But when this same way was a 
rough one, of battle, confusion and danger, the spiritual Cap- 
tain, who led through that, becomes, especially to us who 
Hve under the fruit of his leading, more notable than any 
other. He is the warf aring and battling Priest ; who led his 
people, not to quiet faithful labour as in smooth times, but 
to faithful valorous conflict, in times all violent, dismem- 
bered : a more perilous service, and a more memorable one, 
be it higher or not. These two men we will account our 
best Priests, inasmuch as they were our best Reformers. 
Nay, I may ask. Is not every true Reformer, by the nature 
of him, a Priest first of all? He appeals to Heaven's invis- 
ible justice against Earth's visible force; knows that it, the 
invisible, is strong and alone strong. He is a behever in 
the divine truth of things ; a seer, seeing through the shows 
of things; a worshipper, in one way or the other, of the 
divine truth of things; a Priest, that is. If he be not first 
a Priest, he will never be good for much as a Reformer. 

Thus then, as we have seen Great Men, in various situa- 
tions, building-up Religions, heroic Forms of human Exist- 
ence in this world. Theories of Life worthy to be sung by a 
Dante, Practices of Life by a Shakspeare, — we are now to 
see the reverse process ; which also is necessary, which also 
may be carried-on in the Heroic manner. Curious how this 
should be necessary : yet necessary it is. The mild shining 
of the Poet's Hght has to give place to the fierce lightning 
of the Reformer: fortunately the Reformer too is a per- 



114 LECTURES ON HEROES 

sonage that cannot fail in History ! The Poet indeed, with 
his mildness, what is he but the product and ultimate ad- 
justment of Reform, or Prophecy, with its fierceness? No 
wild Saint Dominies and Thebaid Eremites, there had been 
no melodious Dante; rough Practical Endeavour, Scandi- 
navian and other, from Odin to Walter Raleigh, from Ulfila 
to Cranmer, enabled Shakspeare to speak. Nay the finished 
Poet, I remark sometimes, is a symptom that his epoch it- 
self has reached perfection and is finished; that before long 
there will be a new epoch, new Reformers needed. 

Doubtless it were finer, could we go along always in the 
way of music; be tamed and taught by our Poets, as the 
rude creatures were by their Orpheus of old. Or failing this 
rhythmic musical way, how good were it could we get so 
much as into the equable way; I mean, if peaceable Priests, 
reforming from day to day, would always suffice us ! But it 
is not so; even this latter has not yet been realised. Alas, 
the battling Reformer too is, from time to time, a needful 
and inevitable phenomenon. Obstructions are never want- 
ing: the very things that were once indispensable further- 
ances become obstructions ; and need to be shaken-off , and 
left behind us, — a business often of enormous difficulty. It 
is notable enough, surely, how a Theorem or spiritual Rep- 
resentation, so we may call it, which once took-in the whole 
Universe, and was completely satisfactory in all parts of it 
to the highly-discursive acute intellect of Dante, one of the 
greatest in the world,— had in the course of another century 
become dubitable to common intellects; become deniable; 
and is now, to every one of us, flatly incredible, obsolete as 
Odin's Theorem! To Dante, human Existence, and God's 
ways with men, were all well represented by those Male- 
bolges, Purgatorios; to Luther not well. How was this? 
Why could not Dante's Catholicism continue; but Luther's 
Protestantism must needs follow? Alas, nothing will con- 
tinue. 

I do not make much of ' Progress of the Species, ' as 
handled in these times of ours; nor do I think you would 
care to hear much about it. The talk on that subject is too 



THE HERO AS PRIEST 115 

often of the most extravagant, confused sort. Yet I may- 
say, the fact itself seems certain enough ; nay we can trace- 
out the inevitable necessity of it in the nature of things. 
Every man, as I have stated somewhere, is not only a 
learner but a doer : he learns with the mind given him what 
has been; but with the same mind he discovers farther, he 
invents and devises somewhat of his own. Absolutely with- 
out originality there is no man. No man whatever believes, 
or can believe, exactly what his grandfather believed: he 
enlarges somewhat, by fresh discovery, his view of the 
Universe, and consequently his Theorem of the Universe, — 
which is an infinite Universe, and can never be embraced 
wholly or finally by any view or Theorem, in any conceiv- 
able enlargement : he enlarges somewhat, I say ; finds some- 
what that was credible to his grandfather incredible to him, 
false to him, inconsistent with some new thing he has dis- 
covered or observed. It is the history of every man; and 
in the history of Mankind we see it summed-up into great 
historical amounts, — revolutions, new epochs. Dante's 
Mountain of Purgatory does not stand 4n the ocean of the 
other Hemisphere, ' when Columbus has once sailed thither ! 
Men find no such thing extant in the other Hemisphere. It 
is not there. It must cease to be believed to be there. So 
with all beliefs whatsoever in this world, — all Systems of 
Belief, and Systems of Practice that spring from these. 

If we add now the melancholy fact, that when Belief 
waxes uncertain. Practice too becomes unsound, and errors, 
injustices and miseries everywhere more and more prevail, 
we shall see material enough for revolution. At all turns, 
a man who will do faithfully, needs to believe firmly. If he 
have to ask at every turn the world's suffrage ; if he cannot 
dispense with the world's suffrage, and make his own suf- 
frage serve, he is a poor eye-servant; the work committed 
to him will be m^sdone. Every such man is a daily con- 
tributor to the inevitable downfall. Whatsoever work he 
does, dishonestly, with an eye to the outward look of it, is 
a new offence, parent of new misery to somebody or other. 
Offences accumulate until they become insupportable; and 



116 LECTURES ON HEROES 

are then violently burst through, cleared off as by explosion. 
Dante's sublime Catholicism, incredible now in theory, and 
defaced still worse, by faithless, doubting and dishonest 
practice, has to be torn asunder by a Luther; Shakspeare's 
noble Feudalism, as beautiful as it once looked and was, has 
to end in a French Revolution. The accumulation of of- 
fences is, as we say, too literally exploded, blasted asunder 
volcanically; and there are long troublous periods before 
matters come to a settlement again. 

Surely it were mournful enough to look only at this face 
of the matter, and find in all human opinions and arrange- 
ments merely the fact that they were uncertain, temporary, 
subject to the law of death! At bottom, it is not so: all 
death, here too we find, is but of the body, not of the essence 
or soul; all destruction, by violent revolution or howsoever 
it be, is but new creation on a wider scale. Odinism was 
Valour; Christianism was Humility, a nobler kind of Valour. 
No thought that ever dwelt honestly as true in the heart of 
man but was an honest insight into God's truth on man's 
part, and has an essential truth in it which endures through 
all changes, an everlasting possession for us all. And, on 
the other hand, what a melancholy notion is that, which has 
to represent all men, in all countries and times except our 
own, as having spent their life in blind condemnable error, 
mere lost Pagans, Scandinavians, Mahometans, only that we 
might have the true ultimate knowledge! All generations 
of men were lost and wrong, only that this present little 
section of a generation might be saved and right. They all 
marched forward there, all generations since the beginning 
of the world, like the Russian soldiers into the ditch of 
Schweidnitz Fort, only to fill-up the ditch with their dead 
bodies, that we might march-over and take the place ! It is 
an incredible hypothesis. 

Such incredible hypothesis we have seen maintained with 
fierce emphasis ; and this or the other poor individual man, 
with his sect of individual men, marching as over the dead 
bodies of all men, towards sure victory: but when he too, 
with his hypothesis and ultimate infallible credo, sank into 



THE HERO AS PRIEST 117 

the ditch, and became a dead body, what was to be said? — 
Withal, it is an important fact in the nature of man, that 
he tends to reckon his own insight as final, and goes upon 
it as such. He will always do it, I suppose, in one or the 
other way ; but it must be in some wider, wiser way than 
this. Are not all true men that hve, or that ever Hved, sol- 
diers of the same army, enlisted, under Heaven's captaincy, 
to do battle against the same enemy, the empire of Darkness 
and Wrong? Why should we misknow one another, fight 
not against the enemy but against ourselves, from mere dif- 
ference of uniform? All uniforms shall be good, so they hold 
in them true valiant men. All fashions of arms, the Arab 
turban and swift scimetar, Thor's strong hammer smiting 
down Jotuns, shall be welcome. Luther's battle-voice, 
Dante's march-melody, all genuine things are with us, not 
against us. We are all under one Captain, soldiers of the 
same host. — Let us now look a little at this Luther's fight- 
ing; what kind of battle it was, and how he comported 
himself in it. Luther too was of our spiritual Heroes; a 
Prophet to his country and time. 

As introductory to the whole, a remark about Idolatry 
will perhaps be in place here. One of Mahomet's character- 
istics, which indeed belongs to all Prophets, is unlimited 
implacable zeal against Idolatry. It is the grand .theme of 
Prophets: Idolatry, the worshipping of dead Idols as the 
Divinity, is a thing they cannot away-with, but have to 
denounce continually, and brand with inexpiable reproba- 
tion; it is the chief of all the sins they see done under the 
sun. This is worth noting. We will not enter here into the 
theological question about Idolatry. Idol is Eidolon, a 
thing seen, a symbol. It is not God, but a Symbol of God; 
and perhaps one may question whether any the most be- 
nighted mortal ever took it for more than a Symbol. I 
fancy, he did not think that the poor image his own hands 
had made was God ; but that God was emblemed by it, that 
God was in it some way or other. And now in this sense, 
one may ask, Is not all worship whatsoever a worship by 



118 LECTURES ON HEROES 

Symbols, by eidola, or things seen? Whether seen, rendered 
visible as an image or picture to the bodily eye ; or visible 
only to the inward eye, to the imagination, to the intellect: 
this makes a superficial, but no substantial difference. It 
is still a Thing Seen, significant of Godhead; an Idol. The 
most rigorous Puritan has his Confession of Faith, and in- 
tellectual Representation of Divine things, and worships 
thereby ; thereby is worship first made possible for him. All 
creeds, liturgies, religious forms, conceptions that fitly invest 
religious feelings, are in this sense eidola, things seen. All 
worship whatsoever must proceed by Symbols, by Idols: — 
we may say, all Idolatry is comparative, and the worst 
Idolatry is only more idolatrous. 

Where, then, fies the evil of it? Some fatal evil must lie 
in it, or earnest prophetic men would not on all hands so 
reprobate it. Why is Idolatry so hateful to Prophets? It 
seems to me as if, in the worship of those poor wooden 
symbols, the thing that had chiefly provoked the Prophet, 
and filled his inmost soul with indignation and aversion, was 
not exactly what suggested itself to his own thought, and 
came out of him in words to others, as the thing. The rud- 
est heathen that worshipped Canopus, or the Caabah Black- 
Stone, he, as we saw, was superior to the horse that wor- 
shipped nothing at all! Nay there was a kind of lasting 
merit in that poor act of his; analogous to what is still 
meritorious in Poets : recognition of a certain endless divine 
beauty and significance in stars and all natural objects what- 
soever. Why should the Prophet so mercilessly condemn 
him? The poorest mortal worshipping his Fetish, while his 
heart is full of it, may be an object of pity, of contempt and 
avoidance, if you will; but cannot surely be an object of 
hatred. Let his heart he honestly full of it, the whole space 
of his dark narrow mind illuminated thereby; in one word, 
let him entirely believe in his Fetish, — it will then be, I should 
say, if not well with him, yet as well as it can readily be 
made to be, and you will leave him alone, unmolested there. 

But here enters the fatal circumstance of Idolatry, that, 
in the era of the Prophets, no man's mind is any longer 



THE HERO AS PRIEST 119 

honestly filled with his Idol or Symbol. Before the Prophet 
can arise who, seeing through it, knows it to be mere wood, 
many men must have begun dimly to doubt that it was little 
more. Condemnable Idolatry is insincere Idolatry. Doubt 
has eaten-out the heart of it : a human soul is seen clinging 
spasmodically to an Ark of the Covenant, which it half -feels 
now to have become a Phantasm. This is one of the bale- 
fulest sights. Souls are no longer filled with their Fetish; 
but only pretend to be filled, and would fain make them- 
selves feel that they are filled. ''You do not believe, " said 
Coleridge; ''you only believe that you believe. " It is the 
final scene in all kinds of Worship and Symbolism; the sure 
symptom that death is now nigh. It is equivalent to what 
we call Formulism, and Worship of Formulas, in these days 
of ours. No more immoral act can be done by a human- 
creature; for it is the beginning of all immorality, or rather 
it is the impossibility henceforth of any morality whatso- 
ever: the innermost moral soul is paralysed thereby, cast 
into fatal magnetic sleep ! Men are no longer sincere men. 
I do not wonder that the earnest man denounces this, brands 
it, prosecutes it with inextinguishable aversion. He and it, 
all good and it, are at death-feud. Blamable Idolatry is 
Cant, and even what one may call Sincere-Cant. Sincere- 
Cant: that is worth thinking of! Every sort of Worship 
ends with this phasis. 

I find Luther to have been a Breaker of Idols, no less 
than any other Prophet. The wooden gods of the Koreish, 
made of timber and bees-wax, were not more hateful to 
Mahomet than Tetzel's Pardons of Sin, made of sheepskin 
and ink, were to Luther. It is the property of every Hero, 
in every time, in every place and situation, that he come 
back to reality; that he stand upon things, and not shows 
of things. According as he loves, and venerates, articu- 
lately or with deep speechless thought, the awful realities 
of things, so will the hollow shows of things, however regular, 
decorous, accredited by Koreishes or Conclaves, be intol-- 
erable and detestable to him. ' Protestantism too is the 
work of a Prophet: the prophet- work of that sixteenth cen- 



120 LECTURES ON HEROES 

tury. The first stroke of honest demoHtion to an ancient 
thing grown false and idolatrous; preparatory afar off to a 
new thing, which shall be true, and authentically divine ! — "^ 
At first view it might seem as if Protestantism were 
entirely destructive to this that we call Hero-worship, and 
represent as the basis of all possible good, religious or social, 
for mankind. One often hears it said that Protestantism 
introduced a new era, radically different from any the world 
had ever seen before: the era of ' private judgment,' as they 
call it. By this revolt against the Pope, every man became 
his own Pope; and learnt, among other things, that he must 
never trust any Pope, or spiritual Hero-captain, any more ! 
Whereby, is not spiritual union, all hierarchy and subordi- 
nation among men, henceforth an impossibility? So we 
hear it said. — Now I need not deny that Protestantism was 
a revolt against spiritual sovereignties, Popes and much 
else. Nay I will grant that English Puritanism, revolt 
against earthly sovereignties, was the second act of it; that 
the enormous French Revolution itself was the third act, 
whereby all sovereignties earthly and • spiritual were, as, 
might seem, abolished or made sure of abolition. Protest- 
antism is the grand root from which our whole subsequent 
European History branches out. For the spiritual will 
always body itself forth in the temporal history of men; 
the spiritual is the beginning of the temporal. And now, 
sure enough, the cry is everywhere for Liberty and Equality, 
Independence and so forth; instead of Kings, Ballot-boxes 
and Electoral suffrages : it seems made out that any Hero- 
sovereign, or loyal obedience of men to a man, in things 
temporal or things spiritual, has passed away forever from 
the world. I should despair of the world altogether, if so. 
One of my deepest convictions is, that it is not so. Without 
sovereigns, true sovereigns, temporal and spiritual, I see 
nothing possible but an anarchy; the hatefulest of things. 
But I find Protestantism, whatever anarchic democracy it 
have produced, to be the beginning of new genuine sover- 
eignty and order. I find it to be a revolt against false 
sovereigns; the painful but indispensable first preparative 



THE HERO AS PRIEST 121 

for true sovereigns getting place among us ! This is worth 
explaining a little. 

Let us remark, therefore, in the first place, that this of 
^private judgment' is, at bottom, not a new thing in the 
world, but only new at that epoch of the world. There is 
nothing generically new or peculiar in the Reformation; it 
was a return to Truth and Reality in opposition to False- 
hood and Semblance, as all kinds of Improvement and genu- 
ine Teaching are and have been. Liberty of private judg- 
ment, if we will consider it, must at all times have existed irl 
the world. Dante had not put-out his eyes, or tied shackles 
on himself; he was at home in that Catholicism of his, a free- 
seeing soul in it, — if many a poor Hogstraten, Tetzel and Dr. 
Eck had now become slaves in it. Liberty of judgment? 
No iron chain, or outward force of any kind, could ever com- 
pel the soui of a man to believe or to disbelieve : it is his own 
indefeasible light, that judgment of his; he will reign, and 
believe there, by the grace of God alone! The sorriest 
sophistical Bellarmine, preaching sightless faith and passive 
obedience, must first, by some right of conviction, have ab- 
dicated his right to be convinced. His 'private judgment' 
indicated that, as the advisablest step he could take. The 
right of private judgment will subsist, in full force, wherever 
true men subsist. A true man believes with his whole judg- 
ment, with all the illumination and discernment that is in 
him, and has always so believed. A false man, only strug- 
gling to 'believe that he believes,' will naturally manage it 
in some. other way. Protestantism said to this latter, Woe! 
and to the former. Well done! At bottom, it was no new 
saying; it was a return to all old sayings that ever had been 
said. Be genuine, be sincere: that was, once more, the 
meaning of it. Mahomet believed with his whole mind; 
Odin with his whole mind, — he, and all true Followers of 
Odinism. They, by their private judgment, had 'judged' 
— :So. 

And now I venture to assert, that the exercise of private 
judgment, faithfully gone about, does by no means neces- 
sarily end in selfish independence, isolation; but rather ends 



122 LECTURES ON HEROES 

necessarily in the opposite of that. It is not honest inquiry 
that makes anarchy; but it is error, insincerity, half-belief 
and untruth that make it. A man protesting against error 
is on the way towards uniting himself with all men that 
believe in truth. There is no communion possible among 
men who believe only in hearsays. The heart of each is 
lying dead; has no power of sympathy even with things, — 
or he would believe them and not hearsays. No sympathy 
even with things; how much less with his fellow-men ! He 
cannot unite with men; he is an anarchic man. Only in a 
world of sincere men is unity possible; — and there, in the 
longrun, it is as good as certain. 

For observe one thing, a thing too often left out of view, 
or rather altogether lost sight of, in this controversy : That 
it is not necessary a man should himself have discovered 
the truth he is to believe in, and never so sincerely to believe 
in. A Great Man, we said, was always sincere, as the first 
condition of him. But a man need not be great in order to 
be sincere; that is not the necessity of Nature and all Time, 
but only of certain corrupt unfortunate epochs of Time. A 
man can believe, and make his own, in the most genuine 
way, what he has received from another; — and with bound- 
less gratitude to that other! The merit of originality is not 
novelty; it is sincerity. The believing man is the original 
man; whatsoever he believes, he believes it for himself, not 
for another. Every son of Adam can become a sincere man, 
an original man, in this sense; no mortal is doomed to be an 
insincere man. Whole ages, what we call ages of Faith, are 
original; all men in them, or the most of men in them, sin- 
cere. These are the great and fruitful ages: every worker 
in all spheres, is a worker not on semblance but on substance; 
every work issues in a result: the general sum of such work 
is great; for all of it, as genuine, tends towards one goal; 
all of it is additive, none of it substractive. There is true 
union, true kingship, loyalty, all true and blessed things 
so far as the poor Earth can produce blessedness for men. 

Hero-worship? Ah me, that a man be self-subsistent, 
original, true, or what we call it, is surely the farthest in the 



THE HERO AS PRIEST 123 

world from indisposing him to reverence and believe other 
men's truth ! It only disposes, necessitates and invincibly 
compels him to c?2sbeheve other men's dead formulas, hear- 
says and untruths. A man embraces truth with his eyes 
open, and because his eyes are open: does he need to shut 
them before he can love his Teacher of truth? He alone 
can love, with a right gratitude and genuine loyalty of soul, 
the Hero-Teacher who has dehvered him out of darkness 
into light. Is not such a one a true Hero and Serpent- 
queller; worthy of all reverence! The black monster, 
Falsehood, our one enemy in this world, lies prostrate by his 
valour; it was he that conquered the world for us! — See, 
accordingly, was not Luther himself reverenced as a true 
Pope, or Spiritual Father, being verily such? Napoleon, 
from amid boundless revolt of Sansculottism became a 
King. Hero-worship never dies, nor can die. Loyalty and 
Sovereignty are everlasting in the world : — and there is this 
in them, that they are grounded not on garnitures and sem- 
blances, but on realities and sincerities. Not by shutting 
your .eyes, your 'private judgment;' no, but by opening 
them, and by having something to see! Luther's message 
was deposition and abolition to all false Popes and Poten- 
tates, but life and strength, though afar off, to new genuine 
ones. 

All this of Liberty and Equality, Electoral Suffrages, 
Independence and so forth, w^e will take, therefore, to be a 
temporary phenomenon, by no means a final one. Though 
likely to last a long time, with sad enough embroilments for 
us all, we must welcome it, as the penalty of sins that are 
past, the pledge of inestimable benefits that are coming. 
In all ways, it behoved men to quit simulacra and return to 
fact; cost what it might, that did behove to be done. With 
spurious Popes, and Believers having no private judgment, 
— quacks pretending to command over dupes, — what can 
you do? Misery and mischief only. You cannot make an 
association out of insincere men; you cannot build an edifice 
except by plummet and level, — at W^/i^angles to one an- 
other! In all this wild revolutionary work, from Protest- 



124 LECTURES ON HEROES 

antism downwards, I see the blessedest result preparing 
itself: not abolition of Hero-worship, but rather what I 
would call a whole World of Heroes. If Hero mean sincere 
man, why may not every one of us be a Hero? A world all 
sincere, a believing world : the like has been ; the like will 
again be, — cannot help being. That were the right sort 
of Worshippers for Heroes: never could the truly Better 
be so reverenced as where all were True and Good ! — But we 
must hasten to Luther and his Life. 

Luther's birthplace was Eisleben in Saxony; he came 
into the world there on the 10th of November 1483. It was 
an accident that gave this honour to Eisleben. His parents, 
poor mine-labourers in a village of that region, named Mohra, 
had gone to the Eisleben Winter-Fair : in the tumult of this 
scene the Frau Luther was taken with travail, found refuge 
in some poor house there, and the boy she bore was named 
Martin Luther. Strange enough to reflect upon it. This 
poor Frau Luther, she had gone with her husband to make 
her small merchandisings ; perhaps to sell the lock of yarn 
she had been spinning, to buy the small winter-necessaries 
for her narrow hut or household; in the whole world, that 
day, there was not a more entirely unimportant-looking 
pair of people than this Miner and his Wife. And yet what 
were all Emperors, Popes and Potentates, in comparison? 
There was born here, once more, a Mighty Man; whose Hght 
was to flame as the beacon over long centuries and epochs 
of the world; the whole world and its history was waiting 
for this man. It is strange, it is great. It leads us back to 
another Birth-hour, in a still meaner environment, Eighteen 
Hundred years ago, — of which it is fit that we say nothing, 
that we think only in silence; for what words are there! 
The Age of Miracles past? The Age of Miracles is forever 
here ! — 

I find it altogether suitable to Luther's function in this 
Earth, and doubtless wisely ordered to that end by the 
Providence presiding over him and us and all things, that 
he was born poor, and brought-up poor, one of the poorest 



THE HERO AS PRIEST 125 

of men. He had to beg, as the school-children in those 
times did; singing for alms and bread, from door to door. 
Hardship, rigorous Necessity was the poor boy's companion ; 
no man nor no thing would put-on a false face to flatter 
Martin Luther. Among things, not among the shows of 
things, had he to grow. A boy of rude figure, yet with weak 
health, with his large greedy soul, full of all faculty and 
sensibility, he suffered greatly. But it was his task to get 
acquainted with realities, and keep acquainted with them, 
at whatever cost: his task was to bring the whole world 
back to reality, for it had dwelt too long with semblance! 
A youth nursed-up in wintry whirlwinds, in desolate dark- 
ness and difficulty, that he may step-forth at last from his 
stormy Scandinavia, strong as a true man, as a god: a 
Christian Odin, — a right Thor once more, with his thunder- 
hammer, to smite asunder ugly enough Jbtuns and Giant- 
monsters ! 

Perhaps the turning incident of his life, we may fancy, 
was that death of his friend Alexis, by lightning at the gate 
of Erfurt. Luther had struggled-up through boyhood, bet- 
ter and worse; displaying, in spite of all hindrances, the 
largest intellect, eager to learn: his father judging doubtless 
that he might promote himself in the world, set him upon 
the study of Law. This was the path to rise; Luther, with 
little will in it either way, had consented: he was now nine- 
teen years of age. Alexis and he had been to see the old 
Luther people at Mansfeldt; were got back again near 
Erfurt, when a thunderstorm came on; the bolt struck 
Alexis, he fell dead at Luther's feet. What is this Life of 
ours? — gone in a moment, burnt-up like a scroll, into the 
blank Eternity ! What are all earthly preferments, Chancel- 
lorships. Kingships? They lie shrunk together — there! 
The Earth has opened on them; in a moment they are 
not, and Eternity is. Luther, struck to the heart, deter- 
mined to devote himself to God and God's service alone. 
In spite of all dissuasions from his father and others, he 
became a Monk in the Augustine Convent. at Erfurt. 

This was probably the first light-point in the historj'- of 



126 LECTURES ON HEROES 

Luther, his purer will now first decisively uttering itself ; but, 
for the present, it was still as one light-point in an element 
all of darkness. He says he was a pious monk, ich bin ein 
jrommer Monch gewesen; faithfully, painfully struggling to 
work-out the truth of this high act of his; but it was to little 
purpose. His misery had not lessened; had rather, as it 
were, increased into infinitude. The drudgeries he had to 
do, as novice in his Convent, all sdrts of slave- work, were not 
his grievance: the deep earnest soul of the man had fallen 
into all manner of black scruples, dubitations; he believed 
himself likely to die soon, and far worse than die. One 
hears with a new interest for poor Luther that, at this time, 
he lived in terror of the unspeakable misery; fancied that 
he was doomed to eternal reprobation. Was it not the 
humble sincere nature of the man? What was he, that he 
should be raised to Heaven! He that had known only 
misery, and mean slavery: the news was too blessed to be 
credible. It could not become clear to him how, by fasts, 
vigils, formalities and mass-work, a man's soul could be 
saved. He fell into the blackest wretchedness ; had to wan- 
der staggering as on the verge of bottomless Despair. 

It must have been a most blessed discovery, that of an 
old Latin Bible which he found in the Erfurt Library about 
this time. He had never seen the Book before. It taught 
him another lesson than that of fasts and vigils. A brother 
monk too„of pious experience, was helpful. Luther learned 
now that a man was saved not by singing masses, but by 
the infinite grace of God: a more credible hypothesis. He 
gradually got himself founded, as on the rock. No wonder 
he should venerate the Bible, which had brought this blessed 
'help to him. He prized it as the Word of the Highest must 
be prized by such a man. He determined to hold by that; 
as through life and to death he firmly did. 

This, then, is his deliverance from darkness, his final 
triumph over darkness, what we call his conversion; for him- 
self the most important of all epochs. That he should now 
grow daily in peace and clearness; that, unfolding now the 
great talents and virtues implanted in him. he should rise 



THE HERO AS PRIEST 127 

to importance in his Convent, in his country, and be found 
more and more useful in all honest business of life, is a nat- 
ural result. He was sent on missions by his Augustine 
Order, as a man of talent and fidelity fit to do their business 
well: the Elector of Saxony, Friedrich, named the Wise, a 
truly wise and just Prince, had cast his eye on him as a 
valuable person ; made him Professor in his new University 
of Wittenberg, Preacher too at Wittenberg ; in both which 
capacities, as in all duties he did, this Luther, in the peace- 
able sphere of common life, was gaining more and more 
esteem with all good men. 

It was in his twenty-seventh year that he first saw Rome ; 
being sent thither, as I said, on mission from his Convent. 
Pope Julius the Second, and what was going-on at Rome, 
must have filled the mind of Luther with amazement. He 
had come as to the Sacred City, throne of God's Highpriest 
on Earth ; and he found it — what we know ! Many thoughts 
it must have given the man ; many which we have no record 
of, which perhaps he did not himself know how to utter. 
This Rome, this scene of false priests, clothed not in the 
beauty of holiness, but in far other vesture, is false: but 
what is it to Luther? A mean man he, how shall he reform 
a world? That was far from his thoughts. A humble, 
solitary man, why should he at all meddle with the world? 
It was the task of quite higher men than he. His business 
was to guide his own footsteps wisely through the world. 
Let him do his own obscure duty in it well; the rest, hor- 
rible and dismal as it looks, is in God's hand, not in his. 

It is curious to reflect what might have been the issue, 
had Roman Popery happened to pass this Luther by; to go 
on in its great wasteful orbit, and not come athwart his httle 
path, and force him to assault it ! Conceivable enough that, 
in this case, he might have held his peace about the abuses 
of Rome; left Providence, and God on high, to deal with 
them! A modest quiet man; not prompt he to attack ir- 
reverently persons in authority. His clear task, as I say, 
was to do his own duty; to walk wisely in this world of con- 
fused wickedness, and save his own soul alive. But the 



128 LECTURES ON HEROES 

Roman Highpriesthood did come athwart him: afar off at 
Wittenberg he, Luther, could not get Hved in honesty for it ; 
he remonstrated, resisted, came to extremity; was struck-at, 
struck again, and so it came to wager of battle between 
them ! This is worth attending to in Luther's history. Per- 
haps no man of so humble, peaceable a disposition ever 
filled the world with contention. We cannot but see that 
he would have loved privacy, quiet diligence in the shade; 
that it was against his will he ever became a notoriety. No- 
toriety: whatwould that doforhim? The goal of his march 
through this world was the Infinite Heaven ; an indubitable 
goal for him : in a few years, he should either have attained 
that, or lost it forever ! We will say nothing at all, I think, 
of that sorrowfulest of theories, of its being some mean shop- 
keeper grudge, of the Augustine Monk against the Domin- 
ican, that first kindled the wrath of Luther, and produced 
the Protestant Reformation. We will say to the people who 
maintain it, if indeed any such exist now : Get first into the 
sphere of thought by which it is so much as possible to 
judge of Luther, or of any man like Luther, otherwise than 
distractedly; we may then begin arguing with you. 

The Monk Tetzel, sent out carelessly in the way of trade, 
by Leo Tenth, — who merely wanted to raise a little money, 
and for the rest seems to have been a Pagan rather than a 
Christian, so far as he was anything, — arrived at Witten- 
berg, and drove his scandalous trade there. Luther's flock 
bought Indulgences; in the confessional of his Church, 
peopled pleaded to him that they had already got their sins 
pardoned. Luther, if he would not be found wanting at his 
own post, a false sluggard and coward at the very centre of 
the little space of ground that was his own and no other 
man's, had to step-forth against Indulgences, and declare 
aloud that they were a futility and sorrowful mockery, that 
no man's sins could be pardoned by them. It was the be- 
ginning of the whole Reformation. We know how it went ; 
forward from this first public challenge of Tetzel, on the last 
day of October 1517, through remonstrance and argument; 
— spreading ever wider, rising ever higher; till it became 



THE HERO AS PRIEST 129 

unquenchable, and enveloped all the world. Luther's 
heart's-desire was to have this grief and other griefs 
amended ; his thought was still far other than that of intro- 
ducing separation in the Church, or revolting against the 
Pope, Father of Christendom. — The elegant Pagan Pope 
cared little about this Monk and his doctrines; wished, how- 
ever, to have done with the noise of him : in a space of some 
three years, having tried various softer methods, he thought 
to end it by fire. He dooms the Monk's writing to be 
burnt by the hangman, and his body to be sent bound to 
Rome, — probably for a similar purpose. It was the. way 
they had ended with Huss, with Jerome, the century before. 
A short argument- fire. Poor Huss : he came to that Con- 
stance Council, with all imaginable promises and safe-con- 
ducts ; an earnest, not rebellious kind of man : they laid him 
instantly in a stone dungeon ' three-feet wide, six-feet high, 
seven-feet long;' burnt the true voice of him out of this 
world ; choked it in smoke and fire. That was not well done ! 
I, for one, pardon Luther for now altogether revolting 
against the Pope. The elegant Pagan, by this fire-decree 
of his, had kindled into noble just wrath the bravest heart 
then living in this world. The bravest, if also one of the 
humblest, peaceablest; it was now kindled. These words 
of mine, words of truth and soberness, aiming faithfully, as 
human inability would allow, to promote God's truth on 
Earth, and save men's souls, you, God's vicegerent on earth, 
answer them by the hangman and fire? You will burn me 
and them, for answer to the God's-message they strove to 
bring you? You are not God's vicegerent; you are an- 
other's than his, I think ! I take your Bull, as an emparch- 
mented Lie, and burn it. You will do what you see good 
next: this is what I do. — It was on the 10th of December 
151^0, three years after the beginning of the business, that 
Luther, ' with a great concourse of people, ' took this indig- 
nant step of burning the Pope's fire-decree ^at the Elster- 
Gate of Wittenberg. ' Wittenberg looked on ' with shout- 
ings;' the whole world was looking on. The Pope should 
not have provoked that ^ shout'! It was the shout of the 
9 



130 LECTURES ON HEROES 

awakening of nations. The quiet German heart, modest, 
patient of much, had at length got more than it could bear. 
Formulism, Pagan Popeism, and other Falsehood and cor- 
rupt Semblance had ruled long enough : and here once more 
was a man found who durst tell all men that God's-world 
stood not on semblances but on realities; that Life was a 
truth, and not a lie ! 

At bottom, as was said above, we are to consider Luther 
as a Prophet Idol-breaker; a bringer-back of men to reality. 
It is the function of great men and teachers. Mahomet 
said. These idols of yours are wood; you put wax and oil on 
them, the flies stick on them : they are not God, I tell you, 
they are black wood ! Luther said to the Pope, This thing 
of yours that you call a Pardon of Sins, it is a bit of rag- 
paper with ink. It is nothing else; it, and so much like it, 
is nothing else. God alone can pardon sins. Popeship, 
spiritual Fatherhood of God's Church, is that a vain sem- 
blance, of cloth and parchment? It is an awful fact. God's 
Church is not a semblance, Heaven and Hell are not sem- 
blances. I stand on this, since you drive me to it. Stand- 
ing on this, I a poor German Monk am stronger than you all. 
I stand solitary, friendless, but on God's truth; you with 
your tiaras, triple-hats, with your treasuries and armories, 
thunders spiritual and temporal, stand on the Devil's Lie, 
and are not so strong! — 

The Diet of Worms, Luther's appearance there on the 
17th of April 1521, may be considered as the greatest scene 
in Modern European History; the point, indeed, from which 
the whole subsequent history of civilisation takes its rise. 
After multiplied negotiations, disputations, it had come 
to this. The young Emperor Charles Fifth, with all the 
Princes of Germany, Papal nuncios, dignitaries spiritual 
and temporal, are assembled there: Luther is to appear and 
answer for himself, whether he will recant or not. The 
world's pomp and power sits there on this hand: on that, 
stands-up for God's Truth, one man, the poor miner Hans 
Luther's Son. Friends had reminded him of Huss, advised 
him not to go ; he would not be advised. A large company 



THE HERO AS PRIEST 131 

of friends rode-out to meet him, with still more earnest 
warnings; he answered, "Were there as many Devils in 
Worms as there are roof- tiles, I would on. " The people, on 
the morrow, as he went to the Hall of the Diet, crowded the 
windows and housetops, some of them calling out to him, in 
solemn words, not to recant : " Whosoever denieth me before 
men ! " they cried to him, — as in a kind of solemn petition 
and adjuration. Was it not in reality our petition too, the 
petition of the whole- world, lying in dark bondage of soul, 
paralysed under a black spectral Nightmare and triple- 
hatted Chimera, calling itself Father in God, and what not: 
"Free us; it rests with thee; desert us not ! " 

Luther did not desert us. His speech, of two hojirs, 
distinguished itself by its respectful, wise and honest tone; 
submissive to whatsoever could lawfully claim submission, 
not submissive to. any more than that. His writings, he 
said, were partly his own, partly derived from the Word of 
God. As to what was his own, human infirmity entered into 
it; unguarded anger, blindness, many things doubtless 
which it were a blessing for him could he abolish altogether. 
But as to what stood on sound truth and the Word of God, 
he could not recant it. How could he? "Confute me," 
he concluded, " by proofs of Scripture, or else by plain just 
arguments: I cannot recant otherwise. For it is neither 
safe nor prudent to do aught against conscience. Here 
stand I ; I can do no other : God assist me ! " — It is, as we 
say, the greatest moment in the Modern History of Men. 
English Puritanism, England and its Parliaments, Americas, 
and vast work these two centuries; French Revolution, 
Europe and its work everywhere at present : the germ of it 
all lay there : had Luther in that moment done other, it had 
all been otherwise ! The European World was asking him : 
Am I to sink ever lower into falsehood, stagnant putrescence, 
loathsome accursed death; or with whatever paroxysm, to 
cast the falsehoods out of me, and be cured and live? — 

Great wars, contentions and disunion followed put of this 
Reformation; which last down to our day, and are yet far 



132 LECTURES ON HEROES 

from ended. Great talk and crimination has been made 
about these. They are lamentable, undeniable; but after 
all, what has Luther or his cause to do with them? It seems 
strange reasoning to charge the Reformation with all this. 
When Hercules turned the purifying river into King Au- 
geas's stables, I have no doubt the confusion that resulted 
was considerable all around: but I think it was not Her- 
cules's blame; it was some other's blame! The Reforma- 
tion might bring what results it liked when it came, but the 
Reformation simply could not help coming. To all Popes 
and Popes' advocates, expostulating, lamenting and accus- 
ing, the answer of the world is : Once for all, your Popehood 
has become untrue. No matter how good it was, how good 
you say it is, we cannot believe it; the light of our whole 
mind, given us to walk-by from Heaven above, finds it 
henceforth a thing unbelievable. We will not believe it, we 
will not try to believe it, — we dare not! The thing is un- 
true; we were traitors against the Giver of all Truth, if we 
durst pretend to think it true. Away with it; let what- 
soever likes come in the place of it: with it we can have no 
farther trade! — Luther and his Protestantism is not re- 
sponsible for wars; the false Simulacra that forced him to 
protest, they are responsible. Luther did what every man 
that God has made has not only the right, but lies under the 
sacred duty to do : answered a Falsehood when it questioned 
him. Dost thou believe me?— ^No! — At what cost soever, 
without counting of costs, this thing behoved to be done. 
Union, organisation spiritual and material, a far nobler than 
any Popedom or Feudalism in their truest days, I never 
doubt, is coming for the world ; sure to come. But on Fact 
alone, not on Semblance and Simulacrum, will it be able 
either to come, or to stand when come. With union 
grounded on falsehood, and ordering us to speak and act 
lies, we will not have anything to do. Peace? A brutal 
lethargy is peaceable, the noisome grave is peaceable. We 
hope for a living peace, not a dead one ! 

And yet, in prizing justly the indispensable blessings of 
the New, let us not be unjust to the Old. The Old was true 



THE HERO AS PRIEST 133 

if it no longer is. In Dante's days it needed no sophistry, 
self-blinding or other dishonesty, to get itself reckoned 
true. It was good then; nay there is in the soul of it a 
deathless good. The cry of ' No Popery ' is foolish enough 
in these days. The speculation that Popery is on the in- 
crease, building new chapels and so forth, may pass for one 
of the idlest ever started. Very curious : to count-up a few 
Popish chapels, listen to a few Protestant logic-choppings, — 
to much dull-droning drowsy inanity that still calls itself 
Protestant, and say : See, Protestantism is dead; Popeisem 
is more alive than it, will be alive after it ! — Drowsy inanities, 
not a few, that call themselves Protestant are dead; but 
Protestantism has not died yet, that I hear of ! Protestant- 
ism, if we will look, has in these days produced its Goethe, 
its Napoleon; German Literature and the French Revolu- 
tion; rather considerable signs of life! Nay, at bottom, 
what else is alive hut Protestantism? The life of most else 
that one meets is a galvanic one merely, — not a pleasant, 
not a lasting sort of life ! 

Popery can build new chapels ; welcome to do so, to all 
lengths. Popery cannot come back, any more than Pagan- 
ism can, — which also still lingers in some countries. But, in- 
deed, it is with these things, as with the ebbing of the sea: you 
look at the waves oscillating hither, thither on the beach; 
for minutes you cannot tell how it is going ; look in half an 
hour where it is, — look in half a century where your Pope- 
hood is? Alas, would there were no greater danger to our 
Europe than the poor old Pope's revival ! Thor may as soon 
try to revive. — ^And withal this oscillation has a meaning. 
The poor old Popehood will not die away entirely, as Thor 
has done, for some time yet; nor ought it. We may say, 
the Old never dies till this happen, Till all the soul of good 
that was in it have got itself transfused into the practical 
New. While a good work remains capable of being done 
by the Romish form; or, what is inclusive of all, while a 
pious life remains capable of being led by it, just so long, if 
we consider, will this or the other human soul adopt it, go 
about as a living witness of it. So long it will obtrude itself 



134 LECTURES ON HEROES 

on the eye of us who reject it, till we in our practice too have 
appropriated whatsoever of truth was in it. Then, but also 
not till then, it will have no charm more for any man. It 
lasts here for a purpose. Let it last as long as it can. — 

Of Luther I will add now, in reference to all these wars 
and bloodshed, the noticeable fact that none of them began 
so long as he continued living. The controversy did not 
get to fighting so long as he was there. To me it is proof of 
his greatness in all senses, this fact. How seldom do we 
find a man that has stirred-up some vast commotion, who 
does not himself perish, swept-away in it? Such is the usual 
course of revolutionists. Luther continued, in a good de- 
gree, sovereign of this greatest revolution; all Protestants, 
of what rank or function soever, looking much to him for 
guidance: and he held it peaceable, continued firm at the 
centre of it. A man to do this must have a kingly faculty : 
he must have the gift to discern at all turns where the true 
heart of the matter lies, and to plant himself courageously 
on that, as a strong true man, that other true men may rally 
round him there. He will not continue leader of men other- 
wise. Luther's clear deep force of judgment, his force of 
all sorts, of silence, of tolerance and moderation, among 
others, are very notable in these circumstances. 

Tolerance, I say; a very genuine kind of tolerance: he 
distinguishes what is essential, and what is not; the un- 
essential may go very much as it will. A complaint comes 
to him that such and such a Reformed Preacher 'will not 
preach without a cassock. ' Well, answers Luther, what 
harm will a cassock do the man? ' Let him have a cassock 
to preach in; let him have three cassocks if he find bene- 
fit in them!' His conduct in the matter of Karlstadt's 
wild image-breaking; of the Anabaptists; of the Peasants' 
War, shows a noble strength, very different from spasmodic 
violence. With sure prompt insight he discriminates what 
is what: a strong just man, he speaks-forth what is the wise 
course, and all men follow him in that. Luther's Written 
Works give similar testimony of him. The dialect of 



THE HERO AS PRIEST 135 

these speculations is now grown obsolete for us; but one 
still reads them with a singular attraction. And indeed 
the mere grammatical diction is still legible enough; Lu- 
ther's merit in literary history is of the greatest; his dialect 
became the language of all writing. They are not well 
written, these Four-and-Twenty Quartos of his; written 
hastily, with quite other than literary objects. But in no 
Books have I found a more robust, genuine, I will say noble 
faculty of a man than in these. A rugged honesty, home- 
liness, simplicity; a rugged sterling sense and strength. 
He fiashes-out illumination from him; his smiting idiomatic 
phrases seem to cleave into the very secret of the matter. 
Good humour too, nay tender affection, nobleness, and 
depth: this man could have been a Poet too! He had to 
work an Epic Poem, not write one. I call him a great 
Thinker; as indeed his greatness of heart already betokens 
that. 

Richter says of Luther's words, 'his words are half- 
battles.' They may be called so. The essential quality 
of him was, that he could fight and conquer; that he was a 
right piece of human Valour. No more valiant man, no 
mortal heart to be called braver, that one has record of, ever 
lived in that Teutonic Kindred, whose character is valour. 
His defiance of the ' Devils ' in Worms was not a mere boast, 
as the like might be if now spoken. It was a faith of 
Luther's that there were Devils, spiritual denizens of the Pit, 
continually besetting men. Many times, in his writings, 
this turns-up ; and a most small sneer has been grounded on 
it by some. In the room of the Wartburg where he sat 
translating the Bible, they still show you a black spot on 
the wall; the strange memorial of one of these conflicts. 
Luther sat translating one of the Psalms; he was worn- 
down with long labour, with sickness, abstinence from food : 
there rose before him some hideous indefinable Image, 
which he took for the Evil One, to forbid his work: Luther 
started-up, with fiend-defiance; flung his inkstand at the 
spectre, and it disappeared! The spot still remains there; 
a curious monument of several things. Any apothecary's 



136 LECTURES ON HEROES 

apprentice can now tell us what we are to think of this ap- 
parition, in a scientific sense : but the man's heart that dare 
rise defiant, face to face, against Hell itself, can give no 
higher proof of fearlessness. The thing he will quail before 
exists not on this Earth or under it. — Fearless enough! 
' The Devil is aware, ' writes he on one occasion, ' that this 
' does not proceed out of fear in me. I have seen and defied 
' innumerable Devils. Duke George, ' of Leipzig, a great 
enemy of his, ' Duke George is not equal to one Devil, ' — 
far short of a Devil ! ' If I had business at Leipzig, I would 
'ride into Leipzig, though it rained Duke-Georges for nine 
' days running. ' What a reservoir of Dukes to ride into ! — 

At the same time, they err greatly who imagine that this 
man's courage was ferocity, mere coarse disobedient ob- 
stinancy and savagery, as many do. Far from that. There 
may be an absence of fear which arises from the absence of 
thought or affection, from the presence of hatred and stupid 
fury. We do not value the courage of the tiger highly! 
With Luther it was far otherwise; no accusation could be 
more unjust than this of mere ferocious violence brought 
against him. A most gentle heart withal, full of pity and 
love, as indeed the truly valiant heart ever is. The tiger 
before a stronger foe — flies: the tiger is not what we call 
valiant, only fierce and cruel. I know few things more 
touching than those soft breathings of affection, soft as a 
child's or a mother's, in this great wild heart of Luther. So 
honest, unadulterated with any cant; homely, rude in their 
utterance; pure as water welling from the rock. What, in 
fact, was all that downpressed mood of despair and repro- 
bation, which we saw in his youth, but the outcome of pre- 
eminent thoughtful gentleness, affections too keen and fine? 
It is the course such men as the poor Poet Cowper fall into. 
Luther to a slight observer might have seemed a timid, weak 
man; modesty, affectionate shrinking tenderness the chief 
distinction of him. It is a noble valour which is roused in a 
heart like this, once stirred-up into defiance, all kindled into 
a heavenly blaze. 

In Luther's Table-Talk, a posthumous Book of anec- 



THE HERO AS PRIEST 137 

dotes and sa3rings collected by his friends, the most interest- 
ing now of all the Books proceeding from him, we have many 
beautiful unconscious displays of the man, and what sort of 
nature he had. His behaviour at the deathbed of his little 
Daughter, so still, so great and loving, is among the most 
affecting things. He is resigned that his little Magdalene 
should die, yet longs inexpressibly that she might live; — 
follows, in awestruck thought, the flight of her little soul 
through those unknown realms. Awestruck; most heart- 
felt, we can see; and sincere, — for after all dogmatic creeds 
and articles, he feels what nothing it is that we know, or can 
know: His little Magdalene shall be with God, as God wills; 
for Luther too that is all; Islam is all. 

Once, he looks-out from his solitary Patmos, the Castle of 
Coburg, in the middle of the night : The great vault of Im- 
mensity, long flights of clouds sailing through it,— dumb, 
gaunt, huge: — who supports all that? " None ever saw the 
pillars of it; yet it is supported." God supports it. We 
must know that God is great, that God is good ; and trust, 
where we cannot see. — Returning home from Leipzig once, 
he is struck by the beauty of the harvest-fields: How it 
stands, that golden yellow corn, on its fair taper stem, its 
golden head bent, all rich and waving there, — the meek 
Earth, at God's kind bidding, has produced it once again; 
the bread of man ! — In the Garden at Wittenberg one even- 
ing at sunset, a little bird has perched for the night: That 
little bird, says Luther, above it are the stars and deep 
Heaven of worlds; yet it has folded its little wings; gone 
trustfully to rest there as in its home : , the Maker of it has 

given it too a home ! Neither are mirthful turns wanting : 

there is a great free human heart in this man. The common 
speech of him has a rugged nobleness, idiomatic, expressive, 
genuine; gleams here and there with beautiful poetic tints. 
One feels him to be a great brother man. His love of Music, 
indeed, is not this, as it were, the summary of all these 
affections in him? Many a wild unutterability he spoke- 
forth from him in the tones of his flute. The Devils fled 
from his flute, he says. Death-defiance on the one hand, and 



V 



138 LECTURES ON HEROES 

such love of music on the other; I could call these the two 
opposite poles of a great soul : between these two all great 
things had room. 

Luther's face is to me expressive of him ; in Kranach's 
best portraits I find the true Luther. A rude plebeian face ; 
with its huge crag-like brows and bones, the emblem of 
rugged energy; at first, almost a repulsive face. Yet in the 
eyes especially there is a wild silent sorrow; an unnamable 
melancholy, the element of all gentle and fine affections; 
giving to the rest the true stamp of nobleness. Laughter 
was in this Luther, as we said; but tears also were there. 
Tears also were appointed him; tears and hard toil. The 
basis of his life was Sadness, Earnestness. In his latter 
days, after all triumphs and victories, he expresses himself 
heartily weary of living; he considers that God alone can 
and will regulate the course things are taking, and that per- 
haps the Day of Judgment is not far. As for him, he longs 
for one thing : that God would release him from his labour, 
and let him depart and be at rest. They understand little 
of the man who cite this in discredit of him ! — I will call this 
Luther a true Great Man; great in intellect, in courage, 
affection and integrity; one of our most lovable and precious 
men. Great, not as a hewn obelisk; but as an Alpine 
mountain, — so simple, honest, spontaneous, not setting-up 
to be great at all ; there for quite another purpose than being 
great ! Ah yes, unsubduable granite, piercing far and wide 
into the Heavens; yet in the clefts of it fountains, green 
beautiful valleys with flowers ! A right Spiritual Hero and 
Prophet; once more, a true Son of Nature and Fact, for 
whom these centuries, and many that are to come yet, will 
be thankful to Heaven. 

The most interesting phasis which the Reformation any- 
where assumes, especially for us English, is that of Puritan- 
ism. In Luther's own country Protestantism soon dwindled 
into a rather barren affair : not a religion or faith, but rather 
now a theological jangling of argument, the proper seat of 
it not the heart; the essence of it sceptical contention: 
which indeed has jangled more and more, down to Voltaire- 



THE HERO AS PRIEST 139 

ism itself, — through Gustavus-Adolphus contentions onward 
to French-Revolution ones! But in our Island there arose 
a Puritanism, which even got itself established as a Presby- 
terianism and National Church among the Scotch; which 
came forth'as a real business of the heart; and has produced . 
in the world very notable fruit. In some cases, one may 
say it is the only phasis of Protestantism that ever got into 
the rank of being a Faith, a true heart-communication with 
Heaven, and of exhibiting itself in History as such. We 
must spare a few words for Knox; himself a brave and re- 
markable man; but still more important as Chief Priest 
and Founder, which one may consider him to be, of the 
Faith that became Scotland's, New England's, Ohver Crom- 
well's. History will have something to say about this, for 
some time to come! 

^^ We may censure Puritanism as we please ; and no one of 
us, I suppose, but would find it a very rough defective thing. 
But we, and all men, may understand that it was a genuine 
thing; for Nature -has adopted it, and it has grown, and 
grows ."^ I say sometimes, that all goes by wager-of-battle in 
this world; that strength, well understood, is the measure of 
all worth. Give a thing time ; if it can succeed, it is a right 
thing. Look now at American Saxondom ; and at that little 
Fact of the sailing of the Mayflower, two-hundred years ago, 
from Delft Haven, in Holland! Were we of open sense as 
the Greeks were, we had found a Poem here ; one of Nature's 
own Poems, such as she writes in broad facts over great con- 
tinents. For it was properly the beginning of America: 
there were straggling settlers in America before, some 
material as of a body was there ; but the soul of it was first 
this. These poor men, driven-out of their own country, not 
able well to live in Holland, determine on settling in the 
New World. Black untamed forests are there, and wild 
savage creatures ; but not so cruel as Starchamber hangmen. 
They thought the Earth would yield them food, if they tilled 
honestly; the everlasting heaven would stretch, there too, 
overhead; they should be left in peace, to prepare for Eter- 
nity by living well in this world of Time; worshipping in 



140 LECTURES ON HEROES 

what they thought the true, not the idolatrous way. They 
clubbed their small means together; hired a ship, the little 
ship Mayflower, and made ready to set sail. 

In Neal's History of the Puritans\is an account of the 
ceremony of their departure: solemnity, we might call it 
rather, for it was a real act of worship. Their minister went 
down with them to the beach, and their brethren whom they 
were to leave behind; all joined in solemn prayer, That God 
would have pity on His poor children, and go with them 
into that waste wilderness, for He also had made that. He 
was there as well as here. — Hah! These men, I think, had 
a work! The weak thing, weaker than a child, becomes 
strong one day, if it be a true thing. Puritanism was only 
despicable, laughable then; but nobody can manage to 
laugh at it now. Puritanism has got weapons and sinews ; 
it has fire-arms, war-navies ; it has cunning in its ten fingers, 
strength in its right arm ; it can steer ships, fell forests, re- 
move mountains; — it is one of the strongest things under 
this sun at present! 

In the history of Scotland, too, I can find properly but 
one epoch : we may say, it contains nothing of world-interest 
at all but this Reformation by Knox. A poor barren coun- 
try, full of continual broils, dissensions, massacrings; a 
people in the last state of rudeness and destitution, little 
better perhaps than Ireland at this day. Hungry fierce 
barons, not so much as able to form any arrangement with 
each other how to divide what they fleeced from these poor 
drudges; but obliged, as the Columbian Repubhcs are at 
this day, to make of every alteration a revolution; no way 
of changing a ministry but by hanging the old ministers on 
gibbets: this is a historical spectacle of no very singular 
significance ! ' Bravery ' enough, I doubt not ; fierce fighting 
in abundance: but not braver or fiercer than that of their 
old Scandinavian Sea-king ancestors; whose exploits we 
have not found worth dwelling on! It is a country as yet 
without a soul: nothing developed in it but what is rude, 
external, semi-animal. And now at the Reformation, the 
iNeal (London, 1755), i. 490. 



THE HERO AS PRIEST 141 

internal life is kindled, as it were, under the ribs of this out- 
ward material death. A cause, the noblest of causes kindles 
itself, like a beacon set on high ; high as Heaven, yet attain- 
able from Earth; — whereby the meanest man becomes not 
a Citizen only, but a Member of Christ's visible Church; a 
veritable Hero, if he prove a true man ! 

Well; this is what I mean by a whole ^nation of heroes;' 
a believing nation. There needs not a great soul to make a 
hero ; there needs a god-created soul which will be true to its 
origin; that will be a great soul! The like has been seen, 
we find. The like will be again seen, under wider forms than 
the Presbyterian: there can be no lasting good done till 
then. — Impossible! say some. Possible? Has it not been 
in this world, as a practised fact? Did Hero-worship fail 
in Knox's case? Or are we made of other clay now? Did 
the Westminster Confession of Faith add some new property 
to the soul of man? God made the soul of man. He did 
not doom any soul of man to live as a Hypothesis and Hear- 
say, in a world filled with such, and with the fatal work and 
fruit of such! 

But to return: This that Knox did for his Nation, I say, 
we may really call a resurrection as from death. It was not 
a smooth business ; but it was welcome surely, and cheap at 
that price, had it been far rougher. On the whole, cheap at 
any price; — as life is. The people began to live: they 
needed first of all to do that, at what cost and costs soever. 
Scotch Literature and Thought, Scotch Industry; James 
Watt, David Hume, Walter Scott, Robert Burns: I find 
Knox and the Reformation acting in the heart's core of 
every one of these persons and phenomena; I find that with- 
out the Reformation they would not have been. Or what 
of Scotland? The Puritanism of Scotland became that of 
England, of New England. A tumult in the High Church 
of Edinburgh spread into a universal battle and struggle 
over all • these realms ; — there came out, after fifty-years 
struggling, what we all call the ' Glorious Revolution, ' a Ha- 
beas-Corpus Act, Free Parliaments, and much else ! — Alas, is 
it not too true what we said, That many men in the van do 



142 LECTURES ON HEROES 

always, like Russian soldiers march into the ditch of 
Schweidnitz, and fill it up with their dead bodies, that the 
rear may pass-over them dry-shod, and gain the honour? 
How many earnest rugged Crom wells, Knoxes, poor Peasant 
Covenanters, wrestling, battling for very life, in rough miry 
places, have to struggle, and suffer, and fall, greatly cen- 
sured, hemired, — before a beautiful Revolution of Eighty- 
eight can step-over them in official pumps and silk-stockings, 
with universal three- times-three ! 

It seems to me hard measure that this Scottish man, now 
after three-hundred years, should have to plead like a culprit 
before the world; intrinsically for having been, in such way 
as it was then possible to be, the bravest of all Scotchmen ! 
Had he been a poor Half-and-half, he could have crouched 
into the corner, like so many others ; Scotland had not been 
delivered; and Knox had been without blame. He is the 
one Scotchman to whom, of all others, his country and the 
world owe a debt. He has to plead that Scotland would for- 
give him for having been worth to it any million ' unblam- 
able' Scotchmen that need no forgiveness! He bared his 
breast to the battle; had to row in French galleys, wander 
forlorn in exile, in clouds and storms ; was censured, shot-at 
through his windows; had a right sore fighting life: if this 
world were his place of recompense, he had made but a bad 
venture of it. I cannot apologise for Knox. To him it is 
very indifferent, these two-hundred-and-fifty years or more, 
what men say of him. But we, having got above all those 
details of his battle, and living now in clearness on the fruits 
of his victory, we, for our own sake, ought to look through 
the rumours and controversies enveloping the man, into 
the man himself. 

y For one thing, I will remark that this post of Prophet to 
his Nation was not of his seeking; Knox had lived forty 
years quietly obscure, before he became conspicuous. He 
was the son of poor parents; had got a college education; 
become a Priest; adopted the Reformation, and seemed 
well content to guide his own steps by the light of it, no- 
wise unduly intruding it on others. He had lived as Tutor 



THE HERO AS PRIEST 143 

in gentlemen's families; preaching when any body of per- 
sons wished to hear his doctrine : resolute he to walk by the 
truth, and speak the truth when called to do it; not am- 
bitious of more; not fancying himself capable of more. In 
this entirely obscure way he had reached the age of forty; 
was with the small body of Reformers who were standing 
siege in St. Andrew's Castle, — when one day in their chapel, 
the Preacher after finishing his exhortation to these fighters 
in the forlorn hope, said suddenly, That there ought to be 
other speakers, that all men who had a priest's heart and 
gift in them ought now to speak; — which gifts and heart one' 
of their own number, John Knox the name of him, had : Had 
he not? said the, Preacher, appealing to all the audience: 
what then is his duty? The people answered affirmatively; 
it was a criminal forsaking of his post if such a man held the 
word that was in him silent. Poor Knox was obliged to 
stand-up; he attempted to reply; he could say no word; — 
burst into a flood of tears, and ran out. It is worth remem- 
bering, that scene. He was in grievous trouble for some 
days. He felt what a small faculty was his for this great 
work. He felt what a baptism he was called to be baptised 
withal." He 'burst into tears.' "^ 

^ Our primary characteristic of a Hero, that he is sincere, 
applies emphatically to Knox. It is not denied anywhere 
that this, whatever might be his other qualities or faults, is 
among the truest of men. With a singular instinct he holds 
to the truth and fact; the truth alone is there for him, the 
rest a mere shadow and deceptive nonentity. However 
feeble, forlorn the reality may seem, on that and that only 
can he take his stand. In the Galleys of the River Loire, 
whither Knox and the others, after their Castle of St. 
Andrew's was taken, had been sent as Galley-slaves, — some 
officer or priest, one day, presented them an Image of the 
Virgin Mother, requiring that they, the blasphemous her- 
etics, should do it reverence. Mother? Mother of God? 
said Knox, when the turn came to him: This is no Mother 
of God : this is ' a pented bredd, ' — a piece of wood, I tell you, 
with paint on it ! She is fitter for swimming, I think, than 



144 LECTURES ON HEROES 

for being worshipped, added Knox; and flung the thing 
into the river. It was not very cheap jesting there: but 
come of it what might, this thing to Knox was and must 
continue nothing other than the real truth; it was a pented 
hredd: worship it he would not. 

He told his fellow-prisoners, in this darkest time, to be of 
courage; the Cause they had was the true one, and must and 
would prosper; the whole world could not put it down. 
Reality is of God's making; it is alone strong. How many 
pented bredds, pretending to be real, are fitter to swim than 
to be worshipped! — This Knox cannot live but by fact: he 
clings to reality as the shipwrecked sailor to the cliff. ^He 
is an instance to us how a man, by sincerity itself, becomes 
heroic : it is the grand gift he has. We find in Knox a good 
honest intellectual talent, no transcendent one; — a nar- 
row, inconsiderable man, as compared with Luther : but in 
heartfelt instinctive adherence to truth, in sincerity, as we 
say, he has no superior; nay, one might ask, What equal 
he has? The heart of him is of the true Prophet cast. " He 
lies there, " said the Earl of Morton at his grave, " who never 
feared the face of man. " He resembles, more than any of 
the moderns, an Old-Hebrew Prophet. The same* inflex- 
ibility, intolerance, rigid narrow-looking adherence to God's 
truth, stern rebuke in the name of God to all that forsake 
truth: an Old-Hebrew Prophet in the guise of an Edinburgh 
Minister of the Sixteenth Century. We are to take him for 
that; not to require him to be other. 

'-'^ Knox's conduct to Queen Mary, the harsh visits he used 
to make in her own palace, to reprove her there, have been 
much commented upon. Such cruelty, such coarseness fills 
us with indignation. On reading the actual narrative of the 
business, what Knox said, and what Knox meant, I must 
say one's tragic feeling is rather disappointed. They are not 
so coarse, these speeches; they seem to be about as fine as 
the circumstances would permit! Knox was not there to 
do the courtier; he came on another errand. Whoever, 
reading these colloquies of his with the Queen, thinks they 
are vulgar insolences of a plebeian priest to a delicate high 



THE HERO AS PRIEST 145 

lady, mistakes the purport and essence of them altogether. 
It was unfortunately not possible to be polite with the Queen 
of Scotland, unless one proved untrue to the Nation and 
Cause of Scotland. A man who did not wish to see the 
land of his birth made a hunting-field for intriguing am- 
bitious Guises, and the Cause of God trampled underfoot of 
Falsehoods, Formulas and the Devil's Cause, had no method 
of making himself agreeable ! " Better that women weep, " ~ 
said Morton, "than that bearded men be forced to weep. " 
Knox was the constitutional opposition-party in Scotland: 
the Nobles of the country, called by their station to take 
that post, were not found in it; Knox had to go, or no one. 
The hapless Queen; — but the still more hapless country, if 
she were made happy ! Mary herself was not without sharp- 
ness enough, among her other qualities: "Who are you," 
said she once, " that presume to school the nobles and sov- 
ereign of this realm? " — " Madam, a subject born within the 
same, " answered he. Reasonably answered ! If the ' sub- 
ject' have truth to speak, it is not the 'subject's' footing 
that will fail him here. — 

v/ We blame Knox for his intolerance. Well surely it is 
good that each of us be as tolerant as possible. Yet, at bot- 
tom, after all the talk there is and has been about it, what is 
tolerance? Tolerance has to tolerate the 'i^?zessential ; and 
to see well what that is. Tolerance has to be noble, meas- 
ured, just in its very wrath, when it can tolerate no longer. 
But, on the whole, we are not altogether here to tolerate! 
We are here to resist, to control and vanquish withal. We 
do not Holerate' Falsehoods, Thieveries, Iniquities, when 
they fasten on us ; we say to them, Thou art false, thou art 
not tolerable! We are here to extinguish Falsehoods, and 
put an end to them, in some wise way ! I will not quarrel 
so much with the way; the doing of the thing is our great 
concern. In this sense Knox was, full surely, intolerant. > 
A man sent to row in French Galleys, and suchlike, for 
teaching the Truth in his own land, cannot always be in the 
mildest humour ! I am not prepared to say that Knox had 
a soft temper; nor do I know that he had what we call an ill 
10 



146 LECTURES ON HEROES 

temper. An ill nature he decidedly had not. Kind honest 
affections dwelt in the much-enduring, hard- worn, ever- 
battling man. That he could rebuke Queens, and had such 
weight among those proud turbulent Nobles, proud enough 
whatever else they were; and could maintain to the end a 
kind of virtual Presidency and Sovereignty in that wild 
realm, he who was only 'a subject born within the same:' 
this of itself will prove to us that he was found, close at hand, 
to be no mean acrid man; but at heart a healthful, strong, 
sagacious man. Such alone can bear rule in that kind. 
They blame him for pulling-down cathedrals, and so forth, 
as if he were a seditious rioting demagogue: precisely the 
reverse is seen to be the fact, in regard to cathedrals and the 
rest of it, if we examine ! Knox wanted no pulling-down of 
stone edifices ; he wanted leprosy and darkness to be thrown 
out of the lives of men. v Tumult was not his element; it 
was the tragic feature of his life that he was forced to dwell 
so much in that. Every such man is the born enemy of 
Disorder ; hates to be in it : but what then? Smooth False- 
hood is not Order; it is the general sumtotal of DisordeY. 
Order is Truth, — each thing standing on the basis that be- 
longs to it: Order and Falsehood cannot subsist together. 

Withal, unexpectedly enough, this Knox has a vein of 
drollery in him; which I like much, in combination with his 
other qualities. He has a true eye for the ridiculous. His 
History, with its rough earnestness, is curiously enlivened 
with this. When the two Prelates, entering Glasgow Ca- 
thedral, quarrel about precedence ; march rapidly up, take 
to hustling one another, twitching one another's rochets, and 
at last flourishing their crosiers like quarter-staves, it is a 
great sight for him everyway ! Not mockery, scorn, bitter- 
ness alone; though there is enough of that too. But a true, 
loving, illuminating laugh mounts-up over the earnest 
visage; not a loud laugh; you would say, a laugh in the 
eyes most of all. An honest-hearted, brotherly man; bro- 
ther to the high, brother also to the low; sincere in his sym- 
pathy with both. He had his pipe of Bourdeaux too, we 
find, in that old Edinburgh house of his; a cheery, social 



THE HERO AS PRIEST 147 



\y 



man, with faces that loved him! They go far wrong who 
think this Knox was a gloomy, spasmodic, shrieking fa- 
natic. Not at all: he was one of the solidest of men. Prac- 
tical, cautious-hopeful, patient; a most shrewd, observing, 
quietly discerning man. In fact, he has very much the type 
of character we assign to the Scotch at' present : a certain 
sardonic taciturnity is in him ; insight enough ; and a stouter 
heart than he himself knows of. He has the power of hold- 
ing his peace over many things which do not vitally concern 
him, — " They? what are they? " But the thing which does 
vitally concern him, that thing he will speak of; and in a 
tone the whole world shall be made to hear: all the more 
emphatic for his long silence. ^ 

This Prophet of the Scotch is to me no hateful man ! — 
He had a sore fight of an existence; wrestling with Popes 
and Principalities; in defeat, contention, life-long struggle; 
rowing as a galley-slave, wandering as an exile. A sore 
fight: but he won it. "Have you hope?" they asked him 
in his last moment, when he could no longer speak. He 
lifted his finger, ' pointed upwards with his finger, ' and so 
died. Honour to him! His works have not died. The 
letter of his work dies, as of all men's; but the spirit of it 
never. 

One word more as to the letter of Knox's work. The 
unforgivable offence in him is, that he wished to set-up 
Priests over the head of Kings. In other words, he strove 
to make the Government of Scotland a Theocracy. This 
indeed is properly the sum of his offences, the essential sin; 
for which what pardon can there be? It is most true, he did, 
at bottom, consciously or unconsciously, mean a Theocracy, 
or Government of God. He did mean that Kings and 
Prime Ministers, and all manner of persons, in public or 
private, diplomatising or whatever else they might be doing, 
should walk according to the Gospel of Christ, and under- 
stand that this was their Law, supreme over all laws. He 
hoped once to see such a thing realised ; and the Petition, 
Thy Kingdom come, no longer an empty word. He was sore 
grieved when he saw greedy worldly Barons clutch hold of 



148 LECTURES ON HEROES , 

the Church's property ; when he expostulated that it was not 
secular property, that 'it was spiritual property, and should 
be turned to true churchly uses, education, schools, worship ; 
— and the Regent Murray had to answer, with a shrug of the 
shoulders, " It is a devout imagination ! " This was Knox's 
scheme of right and truth; this he zealously endeavoured 
after, to realise it. If we think his scheme of truth was too 
narrow, was not true, we may rejoice that he could not 
realise it; that it remained after two centuries of effort, 
unrealisable, and is a ' devout imagination ' still. But how 
shall we blame him for struggling to realise it? Theocracy, 
Government of God, is precisely the thing to be struggled 
for! AU Prophets, zealous Priests, are there for that pur- 
pose. Hildebrancl wished a Theocracy; Cromwell mshed 
it, fought for it; Mahomet attained it. Nay, is it not what 
all zealous men, whether called Priests, Prophets, or what- 
soever else called, do essentially wish, and must wish? That 
right and truth, or God's Law, reign supreme among men, 
this is the Heavenly Ideal (well named in Knox's time, and 
namable in all times, a revealed 'Will of God') tOAvards 
which the Reformer will insist that all be more and more 
approximated. All true Reformers, as I said, are by the 
nature of them Priests, and strive for a Theocracy. 

How far such Ideals can ever be introduced into Prac- 
tice, and at what point our impatience with their non-intro- 
duction ought to begin, is always a question. I think we 
may say safely. Let them introduce themselves as far as 
they can contrive to do it ! If they are the true faith of men, 
all men ought to be more or less impatient always where 
they are not found introduced. There will never be wanting 
Regent-Murrays enough to shrug their shoulders, and say, 
" A devout imagination ! " We will praise the Hero-Priest 
rather, who does what is in him to bring them in ; and wears- 
out, in toil, calumny, contradiction, a noble life, to make a 
God's Kingdom of this Earth. The Earth will not become 
too godlike! 



LECTURE V. 

THE HERO AS MAN OF LETTERS. JOHNSON, 
ROUSSEAU, BURNS. 

[Tuesday, 19th May 1840.] 

Hero-gods, Prophets, Poets, Priests are forms of Heroism 
that' belong to the old ages, make their appearance in the 
remotest times; some of them have ceased to be possible 
long since, and cannot any more show themselves in this 
world. The Hero as Man of Letters, again, of which class 
we are to speak today, is altogether a product of these new 
ages; and so long as the wondrous art of Writing, or of 
Ready-writing which we call Printing, subsists, he may be 
expected to continue, as one of the main forms of Heroism 
for all future ages. He is, in various respects, a very singu- 
lar phenomenon. 

He is new, I say; he has hardly lasted above a century 
in the world yet. Never, till about a hundred years ago, 
was there seen any figure of a Great Soul living apart in 
that anomalous manner; endeavouring to speak-forth the 
inspiration that was in him by Printed Books, and find 
place and subsistence by what the world would please to 
give him for doing that. Much had been sold and bought, 
and left to make its own bargain in the marketplace; but 
the inspired wisdom of a Heroic Soul never till then, in that 
naked manner. He, with his copy-rights and copy-wrongs, 
in his squahd garret, in his rusty coat; ruling (for this is 
what he does), from his grave, after death, whole nations 
and generations who would, or would not, give him bread 
while living, — is a rather curious spectacle ! Few shapes of 
Heroism can be more unexpected. 

Alas, the Hero from of old has had to cramp himself 

149 



150 LECTURES ON HEROES 

into strange shapes ; the world knows not well at any time 
what to do with him, so foreign is his aspect in the world! 
It seemed absurd to us, that men, in their rude admiration, 
should take some wise great Odin for a god, and worship him 
as such; some wise great Mahomet for one god-inspired, 
and religiously follow his Law for twelve centuries: but 
that a wise great Johnson, a Burns, a Rousseau, should be 
taken for some idle nondescript, extant in the world to 
amuse idleness, and have a few coins and applauses thrown, 
him, that he might live thereby; this perhaps, as before 
hinted, will one day seem a still absurder phasis of things ! — 
Meanwhile, since it is the spiritual alwaj^s that determines 
the material, this same Man-of-Letters Hero must be re- 
garded as our most important modern person. He, such as 
he may be, is the soul of all. What he teaches, the whole 
world will do and make. The world's manner of dealing 
with him is the most significant feature of the world's gen- 
eral position. Looking well at his hfe, we may get a glance, 
as deep as is readily possible for us, into the life of those sin- 
gular centuries which have produced him, in which we our- 
selves live and work. 

There are genuine Men of Letters, and not genuine; as 
in every kind there is a genuine and a spurious. If Hero be 
taken to mean genuine, then I say the Hero as Man of Let- 
ters will be found discharging a function for us which is ever 
honourable, ever the highest; and was once well known to 
be the highest. He is uttering-forth, in such way as he has, 
the inspired soul of him; all that a man, in any case, can 
do. I say inspired; for what we call 'originality,' 'sincer- 
ity,' ' genius,' the heroic quality we have no good name for, 
signifies that. The Hero is he who lives in the inward sphere 
of things, in the True, Divine and Eternal, which exists al- 
ways, unseen to most, under the Temporary, Trivial: his 
being is in that ; he declares that abroad, by act or speech 
as it may be, in declaring himself abroad. His life, as we 
said before, is a piece of the everlasting heart of Nature her- 
self: all men's life is, — but the weak many know not the 
fact, and are untrue to it, in most times; the strong few 



THE HERO AS MAN OF LETTERS 151 

are strong, heroic, perennial, because it cannot be hidden 
from them. The Man of Letters, Uke every Hero, is there 
to proclaim this in such sort as he can. Intrinsically it is 
the same function which the old generations named a man 
Prophet, Priest, Divinity for doing; which all manner of 
Heroes, by speech or by act, are sent into the world to do. 

Fichte the German Philosopher delivered, some forty 
years ago at Erlangen, a highly remarkable Course of Lect- 
ures on this subject: ' Ueber das Wesen des Gelehrten, On the 
Nature of the Literary Man.' Fichte, in conformity with 
the Transcendental Philosophy, of which he was a distin- 
guished teacher, declares first : That all things which we see 
or work with in this Earth, especially we ourselves and all 
persons, are as a kind of vesture or sensuous Appearance: 
that under all there lies, as the essence of them, what he 
calls the 'Divine Idea of the World;' this is the Reality 
which 'lies at the bottom of all Appearance.' To the mass 
of men no such Divine Idea is recognisable in the world; 
they live merely, says Fichte, among the superficialities, 
practicalities and shows of the world, not dreaming that 
there is anything divine under them. But the Man of Let- 
ters is sent hither specially that he may discern for himself, 
and make manifest to us, this same Divine Idea: in every 
new generation it will manifest itself in a new dialect; and 
he is there for the purpose of doing that. Such is Fichte's 
phraseology; with which we need not quarrel. It is his way 
of naming what I here, by other words, am striving imper- 
fectly to name ; what there is at present no name for : The 
unspeakable Divine Significance, full of splendour, of won- 
der and terror, that lies in the being of every man, of every- 
thing, — the Presence of the God who made every man and 
thing. Mahomet taught this in his dialect; Odin in his: it 
is the thing which all thinking hearts, in one dialect or an- 
other, are here to teach. 

Fichte calls the Man of Letters, therefore, a Prophet, or 
as he prefers to phrase it, a Priest, continually unfolding the 
GodHke to men : Men of Letters are a perpetual Priesthood, 
from age to age, teaching all men that a God is still present 



152 LECTURES ON HEROES 

in their life; that all 'Appearance/ whatsoever we see in 
the world, is but as a vesture for the 'Divine Idea of the 
World/ for 'that which lies at the bottom of Appearance.' 
In the true Literary Man there is thus ever, acknowledged 
or not by the world, a sacredness: he is the light of the 
world; the world's Priest; — guiding it, like a sacred Pillar 
of Fire, in its dark pilgrimage through the waste of Time. 
Fichte discriminates with sharp zeal the true Literary Man, 
what we here call the Hero as Man of Letters, from multi- 
tudes of false unheroic. Whoever lives not wholly in this 
Divine Idea, or living partially in it, struggles not, as for 
the one good, to live wholly in it, — he is, let him live where 
else he like, in what pomps and prosperities he like, no Lit- 
erary Man; he is, says Fichte, a 'Bungler, Stumper.' Or at 
best, if he belong to the prosaic provinces, he may be a 
'Hodman;' Fichte even calls him elsewhere a 'Nonentity,' 
and has in short no mercy for him, no wish ihsit he should 
continue happy among us! This is Fichte's notion of the 
Man of Letters. It means, in its own form, precisely what 
we here mean. 

In this point of view, I consider that, for the last hun- 
dred years, by far the notablest of all Literary Men is 
Fichte's countryman, Goethe. To that man too, in a 
strange way, there was given what we may call a life in the 
Divine Idea of the World ; vision of the inward divine mys- 
tery: and strangely, out of his Books, the world rises im- 
aged once more as godlike, the workmanship and temple of 
a God. Illuminated all, not in fierce impure fire-splendour 
as of Mahomet, but in mild celestial radiance; — really a 
Prophecy in these most unprophetic times; to my mind, by 
far the greatest, though one of the quietest, among all the 
great things that have come to pass in them. Our chosen 
specimen of the Hero as Literary Man would be this Goethe. 
And it were a very pleasant plan for me here to discourse of 
his heroism: for I consider him to be a true Hero; heroic in 
what he said and did, and perhaps still more in what he did 
not say and did not do; to me a noble spectacle: a great 
heroic ancient man, speaking and keeping silence as an an- 



THE HERO AS MAN OF LETTERS 153 

cient Hero, in the guise of a most modern, high-bred, high- 
cultivated Man of Letters ! We have had no such spectacle; 
no man capable of affording such, for the last hundred-and- 
fifty years. 

But at present, such is the general state of knowledge 
about Goethe, it were worse than useless to attempt speak- 
ing of him in this case. Speak as I might, Goethe, to the 
great majority of you, would remain problematic, vague; 
no impression but a false one could be realised. Him we 
must leave to future times. Johnson, Burns, Rousseau, 
three great figures from a prior time, from a far inferior 
state of circumstances, will suit us better here. Three men 
of the Eighteenth Century; the conditions of their life far 
more resemble what those of ours still are in England, than 
what Goethe's in Germany were. Alas, these men did not 
conquer like him; they fought bravely, and fell. They 
were not heroic bringers of the light, but heroic seekers of it. 
They lived under galling conditions; struggling as under 
mountains of impediment, and could not unfold themselves 
into clearness, or victorious interpretation of that ^Divine 
Idea.' It is rather the Tombs of three Literary Heroes that 
I have to show you. There are the monumental heaps, 
under which three spiritual giants lie buried. Very mourn- 
ful, but also great and full of interest for us. We will linger 
by them for a while. 

Complaint is often made, in these times, of what we call 
the disorganised condition of society: how ill many ar- 
ranged forces of society fulfil their work; how many power- 
ful forces are seen working in a wasteful, chaotic, altogether 
unarranged manner. It is too just a complaint, as we all 
know. But perhaps if we look at this of Books and the 
Writers of Books, we shall find here, as it were, the sum- 
mary of all other disorganisation; — a sort of heart, from 
which, and to which, all other confusion circulates in the 
world! Considering what Book-writers do in the world, 
and what the world does with Book- writers, I should say, 
It is the most anomalous thing the world at present has to 



154 LECTURES ON HEROES 

show. — We should get .into a sea far beyond sounding, did 
we attempt to give account of this . but we must glance at 
it for the sake of our subject. The worst element in the life 
of these three Literary Heroes was, that they found their 
business and position such a chaos. On the beaten road 
there is tolerable travelling; but it is sore work, and many 
have to perish, fashioning a path through the impassable! 

Our pious Fathers, feeling well what importance lay in 
the speaking of man to men, founded churches, made en- 
dowments, regulations; everywhere in the civihsed world 
there is a Pulpit, environed with all manner of complex dig- 
nified appurtenances and furtherances, that therefrom a 
man with the tongue may, to best advantage, address his 
fellow-men. They felt that this was the most important 
thing; that without this there was no good thing. It is a 
right pious work, that of theirs; beautiful to behold! But 
now with the art of Writing, with the art of Printing, a 
total change has come over that business. The Writer of a 
Book, is not he a Preacher preaching not to this parish or 
that, on this day or that, but to all men in all times and 
places? Surely it is of the last importance that he do his 
work right, whoever do it wrong; — that the eye report not 
falsely, for then all the other members are astray! Well; 
how he may do his work, whether he do it right or wrong, or 
do it at all, is a point which no man in the world has taken 
the pains to think of. To a certain shopkeeper, trying to 
get some money for his books, if lucky, he is of some im- 
portance; to no other man of any. Whence he came, 
whither he is bound, by what ways he arrived, by what he 
might be furthered on his course, no one asks. He is an 
accident in society. He wanders like a wild Ishmaelite, in 
a world of which he is as the spiritual light, either the guid- 
ance or the misguidance ! 

Certainly the Art of Writing is the most miraculous of 
all things man has devised. Odin's Runes were the first 
form of the work of a Hero; Books, written words, are still 
miraculous Runes, the latest form! In Books lies the soul 
of the whole Past Time ; the articulate audible voice of the 



THE HERO AS MAN OF LETTERS 155 

Past, when the body and material substance of it has alto- 
gether vanished like a dream. Mighty fleets and armies, 
harbours and arsenals, vast cities, high-domed, many- 
engined, — they are precious, great: but what do they be- 
come ? Agamemnon, the many Agamemnons, Pericleses, 
and their Greece ; all is gon^ now to some ruined fragments, 
dumb mournful wrecks and blocks : but the Books of Greece ! 
There Greece, to every thinker, still very literally lives; 
can be called-up again into life. No magic Rune is stranger 
than a Book. All that Mankind has done, thought, gained 
or been: it is lying as in magic preservation in the pages of 
Books. They are the chosen possession of men. 

Do not Books still accomplish miracles, as Runes were 
fabled to do? They persuade men. Not the wretchedest 
circulating-library novel, which foolish girls thumb and con 
in remote villages, but will help to regulate the actual prac- 
tical weddings and households of those foolish girls. So 
'Celia' felt, so 'CHfford' acted: the foolish Theorem of 
Life, stamped into those young brains, comes out as a solid 
Practice one day. Consider whether any Rune in the wild- 
est imagination of Mythologist ever did such wonders as, on 
the actual firm Earth, some Books have done ! What built 
St. Paul's Cathedral? Look at the heart of the matter, it 
was that divine Hebrew Book, — the word partly of the 
man Moses, an outlaw tending his Midianitish herds, four- 
thousand years ago, in the wildernesses of Sinai! It is the 
strangest of things, yet nothing is truer. With the art of 
Writing, of which Printing is a simple, an inevitable and 
comparatively insignificant corollary, the true reign of mira- 
cles for mankind commenced. It related, with a wondrous 
new contiguity and perpetual closeness, the Past and Dis- 
tant with the Present in time and place; all times and all 
places with this our actual Here and Now. All things were 
altered for men; all modes of important work of men: 
teaching, preaching, governing, and all else. 

To look at Teaching, for instance. Universities are a 
notable, respectable product of the modern ages. Their ex- 
istence too is modified, to the very basis of it, by the exist- 



156 LECTURES ON HEROES ' 

ence of Books. Universities arose while there were yet no . 
Books procurable; while a man, for a single Book, had to 
give an estate of land. That, in those circumstances, when 
a man had some knowledge to communicate, he should do 
it by gathering the learners round him, face to face, was a 
necessity for him. If you wanted to know what Abelard 
knew, you must go and listen to Abelard. Thousands, as 
many as thirty-thousand, went to hear Abelard and that 
metaphysical theology of his. And now for any other 
teacher who had also something of his own to teach, there 
was a great convenience opened: so many thousands eager 
to learn were already assembled yonder; of all places the 
best place for him was that. For any third teacher it was 
better still; and grew ever the better, the more teachers 
there came. It only needed now that the King took notice 
of this new phenomenon; combined or agglomerated the 
various schools into one school; gave it edifices, privileges, 
encouragements, and named it Universitas, or School of all 
Sciences: the University of Paris, in its essential charac- 
ters, was there. The model of all subsequent Universities; 
which down even to these days, for six centuries now, have 
gone on to found themselves. Such, I conceive, was the 
origin of Universities. 

It is clear, however, that with this simple circumstance, 
facility of getting Books, the whole conditions of the busi- 
ness from top to bottom were changed. Once invent Print- 
ing, you metamorphosed all Universities, or superseded 
them! The Teacher needed not now to gather men per- 
sonally round him, that he might speak to them what he 
knew : print it in a Book, and all learners far and wide, for 
a trifle, had it each at his own fireside, much more effectually 
to learn it! — Doubtless there is still peculiar virtue in 
Speech; even writers of Books may still, in some circum- 
stances, find it convenient to speak also,— witness our pres- 
ent meeting here ! There is, one would say, and must ever 
remain while man has a tongue, a distinct province for 
Speech as well as for Writing and Printing. In regard to all 
things this must remain; to Universities among others. 



THE HERO AS MAN OF LETTERS 157 

But the limits of the two have nowhere yet been pointed 
out ascertained; much less put in practice: the University 
which would completely take-in that great new fact, of the 
existence of Printed Books, and stand on a clear footing for 
the Nineteenth Century as the Paris one did for the Thir- 
teenth, has not yet come into existence. If we think of it, 
all that a University, or final highest School can do for us, 
is still but what the first School began doing, — teach us to 
read. We learn to read, in various languages, in various 
sciences ; we learn the alphabet and letters of all manner of 
Books. But the place where we are to get knowledge, even 
theoretic knowledge, is the Books themselves ! It depends 
on what we read, after all manner of Professors have done 
their best for us. The true University of these days is a 
Collection of Books. 

But to the Church itself, as I hinted already, all is 
changed, in its preaching, in its working, by the introduc- 
tion of Books. The Church is the working recognized Union 
of our Priests or Prophets, of those who by wise teaching 
guide the souls of men. While there was no writing, even 
while there was no Easy-writing or Printing, the preaching 
of the voice was the natural sole method of performing this. 
But now with Books ! — He that can write a true Book, to 
persuade England, is not he the Bishop and Archbishop, 
the Primate of England and of all England? I many a time 
say, the writers of Newspapers, Pamphlets, Poems, Books, 
these are the real working effective Church of a modern 
country. Nay not only our preaching, but even our wor- 
ship, is not it too accomplished by means of Printed Books? 
The noble sentiment which a gifted soul has clothed for us 
in melodious words, which brings melody into our hearts, — 
is not this essentially, if we will understand it, of the nature 
of worship? There are many, in all countries, who, in this 
confused time, have no other method of worship. He who, 
in any way, shows us better than we knew before that' a 
lily of the fields is beautiful^ does he not show it us as an 
effluence of the Fountain of all Beauty; as the handwriting, 
made visible there, of the great Maker of the Universe? He 



158 LECTURES ON HEROES 

has sung for us, made us sing with him, a little verse of a 
sacred Psalm. Essentially so. How nmch more he who 
sings, who says, or in any way brings home to our heart the 
noble doings, feelings, darings and endurances of a brother 
man ! He has verily touched our hearts as with a live coal 
frovi the altar. Perhaps there is no worship more authentic. 

Literature, so far as it is Literature, is an ' apocalypse of 
Nature,' a revealing of the 'open secret.' It may well 
enough be named, in Fichte's style, a 'continuous revela- 
tion' of the Godlike in the Terrestrial and Common. The 
Godlike does ever, in very truth, endure there; is brought 
out, now in this dialect, now in that, with various degrees 
of clearness : all true gifted Singers and Speakers are, con- 
sciously or unconsciously, doing so. The dark stormful in- 
dignation of a Byron, so wayward and perverse, may have 
touches of it ; nay the withered mockery of a French sceptic, 
— his mockery of the False, a love and worship of the True. 
How much more the sphere-harmony of a Shakspeare, of a 
Goethe; the cathedral-music of a Milton! They are some- 
thing too, those humble genuine lark-notes of a Burns, — 
skylark, starting from the humble furrow, far overhead into 
the blue depths, and singing to us so genuinely there ! For 
all true singing is of the nature of worship; as indeed all 
true working may be said to be, — whereof such singing is 
but the record, and fit melodious representation, to us. 
Fragments of a real ' Church Liturgy ' and ' Body of Homi- 
lies, ' strangely disguised from the common eye, are to be 
found weltering in that huge froth-ocean of Printed Speech 
we loosely call Literature ! Books are our Church too. 

Or turning now to the Government of men. Witenage- 
mote, old Parliament, was a great thing. The affairs of the 
nation were there deliberated and decided; what we were 
to do as a nation. But does not, though the name Parlia- 
ment subsists, the parliamentary debate go on now, every- 
where and at all times, in a far more comprehensive way, 
out of Parliament altogether? Burke said there were Three 
Estates in Parliament ; but, in the Reporters' Gallery yon- 
der, there sat a Fourth Estate more important far than they 



THE HERO AS MAN OF LETTERS 159 

all. It is not a figure of speech, or a witty saying; it is a 
literal fact, — very momentous to us in these times. Liter- 
ature is our Parliament too. Printing, which comes neces- 
sarily out of Writing, I say often, is equivalent to Democ- 
racy: invent Writing, Democracy is inevitable. Writing 
brings Printing; brings universal everyday extempore 
Printing, as we see at present. Whoever can speak, speak- 
ing now to the whole nation, becomes a power, a branch of 
government, with inalienable weight in law-making, in all 
acts of authority. It matters not what rank he has, what 
revenues or garnitures : the requisite thing is, that he have 
a tongue which others will listen to ; this and nothing more 
is requisite. The nation is governed by all that has tongue 
in the nation: Democracy is virtually there. Add only, 
that whatsoever power exists will have itself, by and by, 
organised; working secretly under bandages, obscurations, 
obstructions, it will never rest till it get Jbo work free, unen- 
cumbered, visible to all. Democracy virtually extant will 
insist on becoming palpably extant. — 

On all sides, are we not driven to the conclusion that, of 
the things which man can do or make here below, by far the 
most momentous, wonderful and worthy are the things we 
call Books ! Those poor bits of rag-paper with black ink on 
them,— from the Daily Newspaper to the sacred Hebrew 
Book, what have they not done, what are they not doing ! 
— For indeed, whatever be the outward form of the thing 
(bits of paper, as we say, and black ink), is it not verily, at 
bottom, the highest act of man's faculty that produces a 
Book? It is the Thought of man; the true thaumaturgic 
virtue; by which man works all things whatsoever. All 
that he does, and brings to pass, is the vesture of a Thought. 
This London City, with all its houses, palaces, steamengines, 
cathedrals, and huge immeasurable traffic and tumult, what 
is it but a Thought, but millions of Thoughts made into 
One; — a huge immeasurable Spirit of a Thought, embodied 
in brick, in iron, smoke, dust, Palaces, Parliaments, Hack- 
ney Coaches, Katherine Docks, and the rest of it! Not a 
brick was made but some man had to think of the making 



160 LECTURES ON HEROES 

of that brick. — The thing we called ' bits of paper with traces 
of black ink, ' is the purest embodiment a Thought of man can 
have. No wonder it is, in all ways, the activest and noblest. 

All this, of the importance and supreme importance of 
the Man of Letters in modern Society, and how the Press is 
to such a degree superseding the Pulpit, the Senate, the 
Senatus Academicus and much else, has been admitted for 
a good while; and recognised often enough, in late times, 
Avith a sort of sentimental triumph and wonderment. It 
seems to me, the Sentimental by and by will have to give 
place to the Practical. If Men of Letters are so incalculably 
influential, actually performing such work for us from age 
to age, and even from day to day, then I think we may con- 
clude that Men of Letters will not always wander like unrec- 
ognised unregulated Ishmaelites among us! Whatsoever 
thing, as I said above, has virtual unnoticed power will cast- 
off its wrappages, bandages, and step-forth one day with 
palpably articulated, universally visible power. That one 
man wear the clothes, and take the wages, of a function 
which is done by quite another: there can be no profit in 
this ; this is not right, it js wrong. And yet, alas, the mak- 
ing of it right, — what a business, for long times to come ! 
Sure enough, this that we call Organisation of the Literary 
Guild is still a great way off, encumbered with all manner 
of complexities. If you asked me what were the best pos- 
sible organisation for the Men of Letters in modern society; 
the arrangement of furtherance and regulation, grounded 
the most accurately on the actual facts of their position and 
of the world's position, — I should beg to say that the prob- 
lem far exceeded my faculty! It is not one man's faculty; 
it is that of many successive men turned earnestly upon it, 
that will bring-out even an approximate solution. What 
the best arrangement were, none of us could say. But if 
you ask, Which is the worst? I answer: This which we now 
have, that Chaos should sit umpire in it; this is the worst. 
To the best, or any good one, there is yet a long way. 

One remark I must not omit, That royal or parliamen- 
tary grants of money are by no means the chief thing 



THE HERO AS MAN OF LETTERS 161 

wanted ! To give our Men of Letters stipends, endowments 
and all furtherance of cash, will do httle towards the busi- 
ness. On the whole, one is weary of hearing about the 
omnipotence of money. I will say rather that, for a genuine 
man, it is no evil to be poor; that there ought to be Literary 
Men poor, — to show whether they are genuine or not! 
Mendicant Orders, bodies of good men doomed to beg, were 
instituted in the Christian Church ; a most natural and even 
necessary development of the spirit of Christianity. It was 
itself founded on Poverty, on Sorrow, Contradiction, Cruci- 
fixion, every species of worldly Distress and Degradation. 
We may say, that he who has not known those things, and 
learned from them the priceless lessons they have to teach, 
has missed a good opportunity of schooling. To beg, and 
go barefoot, in coarse woollen cloak with a rope round your 
loins, and be despised of all the world, was no beautiful 
business; — nor an honourable one in any eye, till the noble- 
ness of those who did so had made it honoured of some ! 

Begging is not in our course at the present time: but 
for the rest of it, who will say that a Johnson is not perhaps 
the better for being poor? It is needful for him, at all rates, 
to know that outward profit, that success of any kind is not 
the goal he has to aim at. Pride, vanity, ill-conditioned 
egoism of all sorts, are bred in his heart, as in every heart; 
need, above all, to be cast-out of his heart, — to be, with 
whatever pangs, torn-out of it, cast-forth from it, as a thing 
worthless. Byron, born rich and noble, made-out even less 
than Burns, poor and plebeian. Who knows but, in that 
same 'best possible organisation' as yet far off. Poverty 
may still enter as an important element? What if our Men 
of Letters, men setting-up to be Spiritual Heroes, were still 
then, as they now are, a kind of 'involuntary monastic 
order;' bound still to this same ugly Poverty, — till they 
had tried what was in it too, till they had learned to make 
it too do for them ! Money, in truth, can do much, but it 
cannot do all. We must know the province of it, and con- 
fine it there; and even spurn it back, when it wishes to get 
farther. 

11 . 



162 LECTURES ON HEROES 

Besides, were the money-furtherances, the proper season 
for them, the fit assigner of them, all settled, — how is the 
Burns to be recognised that merits these? He must pass 
through the ordeal, and prove himself. This ordeal; this 
wild welter of a chaos which is called Literary Life; this too 
is a kind of ordeal ! There is clear truth in the idea that a 
struggle from the lower classes of society, towards the upper 
regions and rewards of society, must ever continue. Strong 
men are born there, w^jo ought to stand elsewhere than 
there. The manifold, inextricably complex, universal strug- 
gle of these constitutes, and must constitute, what is called 
the progress of society. For Men of Letters, as for all other 
sorts of men. How to regulate that struggle? There is the 
whole question. To leave it as it is, at the mercy of blind 
Chance; a whirl of distracted atoms, one cancelling the 
other; one of the thousand arriving saved, nine-hundred- 
and-ninety-nine lost by the way; your royal Johnson lan- 
guishing inactive in garrets, or harnessed to the yoke of 
Printer Cave; your Burns dying broken-hearted as a Gan- 
ger; your Rousseau driven into mad exasperation, kindHng 
French Revolutions by his paradoxes; this, as we said, is 
clearly enough the worst regulation. The best, alas, is far 
from us ! 

And yet there can be no doubt but it is coming; an- 
vancing on us, as yet hidden in the bosom of centuries : this 
is a prophecy one can risk. For so soon as men get to dis- 
cern the importance of a thing, they do infallibly set about 
arranging it, facilitating, forwarding it; and rest not till, in 
some approximate degree, they have accomplished that. I 
say, of all Priesthoods, Aristocracies, Governing Classes at 
present extant in the world, there is no class comparable 
for importance to that Priesthood of the Writers of Books. 
This is a fact which he who runs may read, — and draw 
inferences from. " Literature will take care of itself," an- 
swered Mr. Pitt, when applied- to for some help for Burns. 
"Yes," adds Mr. Southey, "it will take care of itself; and 
of you too, if you do not look to it ! " 

The result to individual Men of Letters is not the mo- 



THE HERO AS M:AN OF LETTERS 163 

mentous one; they are but individuals, an infinitesimal 
fraction of the great body: they can struggle on, and live 
or else die, as they have been wont. But it deeply concerns 
the whole society, whether it will set its light on high places, 
to walk thereby ; or trample it under foot, and scatter it in 
all ways of wild waste (not without conflagration), as here- 
tofore ! Light is the one thing wanted for the world. Put 
wisdom in the head of the world, the world will fight its 
battle victoriously, and be the best world man can make it. 
I call this anomaly of a disorganic Literary Class the heart 
of all other anomalies, at once product and parent; some 
good arrangement for that would be as the punctum saliens 
of a new vitality and just arrangement for all. Already, in 
some European countries, in France, in Prussia, one traces 
some beginnings of an arrangement for the Literary Class; 
indicating the gradual possibihty of such. I believe that it 
is possible; that it will have to be possible. 

By far the most interesting fact I hear about the Chinese 
is one on which we cannot arrive at clearness, but which ex- 
cites endless curiosity even in the dim state: this namely, 
that they do attempt to make their Men of Letters their 
Governors! It would be rash to say, one understood how 
this was done, or with what degree of success it was done. 
All such things must be very i^nsuccessful; yet a small de- 
gree of success is precious ; the very attempt how precious ! 
There does seem to be, all over China, a more or less active 
search everywhere to discover the men of talent that grow 
up in the young generation. Schools there are for every 
one : a foolish sort of training, yet still a sort. The youths 
who distinguish themselves in the lower school are pro- 
moted into favourable stations in the higher, that they may 
still more distinguish themselves, — forward and forward: 
it appears to be out of these that the Official Persons, and 
incipient Governors, are taken. These are they whom they 
try first, whether they can govern or not. And surely with 
the best hope: for they are the men that have already 
shown intellect. Try them: they have not governed or 
administered as yet; perhaps they cannot; but there is no 



164 LECTURES ON HEROES 

doubt they have some Understanding, — without which no 
man can ! Neither is Understanding a tool, as we are too apt 
to figure; 'it is a hand which can handle any tool.' Try 
these men: they are of all others the best worth trying. — 
Surely there is no kind of government, constitution, revo- 
lution, social apparatus or arrangement, that I know of in 
this world, so promising to one's scientific curiosity as this. 
The man of intellect at the top of affairs : this is the aim of 
all constitutions and revolutions, if they have any aim. For 
the man of true intellect, as I assert and believe always, is 
the noblehearted man withal, the true, just, humane and 
valiant man. Get him for governor, all is got; fail to get 
him, though you had (Constitutions plentiful as black- 
berries, and a Parliament in every village, there is 
nothing yet got! — 

These things look strange, truly; and are not such as we 
commonly speculate upon. But we are fallen into strange 
times; these things will require to be speculated upon; to 
be rendered practicable, to be in some way put in practice. 
These, and many others. On all hands of us, there is the 
announcement, audible enough, that the old Empire of 
Routine has ended; that to say a thing has long been, is no 
reason for its continuing to be. The things which have 
been are fallen into decay, are fallen into incompetence; 
large masses of mankind, in every society of our Europe, 
are no longer capable of living at all by the things which 
have been. When millions of men can no longer by their 
utmost exertion gain food for themselves, and 'the third 
man for thirty-six weeks each year is short of third-rate 
potatoes,' the l^hings which have been must decidedly pre- 
pare to alter themselves ! — I will now quit this of the organ- 
isation of Men of Letters. 

Alas, the evil that pressed heaviest on those Literary 
Heroes of ours was not the want of organisation for Men of 
Letters, but a far deeper one; out of which, indeed, this and 
so many other evils for the Literary Man, and for all men, 
had, as from their fountain, taken rise. That our Hero as 



THE HERO AS MAN OF LETTERS 165 

Man of Letters had to travel without highway, companion- 
less, through an inorganic chaos, — and to leave his own life 
and faculty lying there, as a partial contribution towards 
pushing some highway through it: this, had not his faculty 
itself been so perverted and paralysed, he might have put- 
up with, might have considered to be but the common lot 
of Heroes. His fatal misery was the spiritual paralysis, so 
we may name it, of the Age in which his life lay; whereby 
his life too, do what he might, was half-paralysed! The 
Eighteenth was a Sceptical Century; in which little word 
there is a whole Pandora's Box of miseries. Scepticism 
means not intellectual Doubt alone, but moral Doubt; all 
sorts of mfidelity, insincerity, spiritual paralysis. Perhaps, 
in few centuries that one could specify since the world be- 
gan, was a life of Heroism more difficult for a man. That 
was not an age of Faith, — an age of Heroes The very 
possibihty of Heroism had been, as it were, formally abne- 
gated in the minds of all. Heroism was gone forever; Triv- 
iality, Formulism and Commonplace were come forever. 
The ' age of miracles ' had been, or perhaps had not been ; 
but it was not any longer. An effete world; wherein Won- 
der, Greatness, Godhood could not now dwell; — in one 
word, a godless world ! 

How mean, dwarfish are their ways of thinking, in this 
time, — compared not with the Christian Shakspeares and 
Miltons, but with the old Pagan Skalds, with any species of 
beheving men! The Hving Tree Igdrasil, with the melo- 
dious prophetic waving of its world-wide boughs, deep- 
rooted as Hela, has died-out into the clanking of a World- 
Machine. 'Tree' and 'Machine:' contrast these two 
things. I, for my share, declare the world to be no machine ! 
I say that it does not go by wheel-and-pinion ' motives,' self- 
interests, checks, balances; that there is something far 
other in it than the clank of spinning- jennies, and parlia- 
mentary majorities; and, on the whole, that it is not a 
machine at all ! — The old Norse Heathen had a truer notion 
of God's-world than these poor Machine-Sceptics: the old 
Heathen Norse were sincere men. But for these poor seep- 



166 LECTURES ON HEROES 

tics there was no sincerity, no truth. Half-truth and hear- 
say was called truth. Truth, for most men, meant plausi- 
bility; to be measured by the number of votes you could 
get. They had lost any notion that sincerity was possible, 
or of what sincerity was. How many Plausibilities asking, 
with unaffected surprise and the air of offended virtue, 
What! am not I sincere? Spiritual Paralysis, I say, noth- 
ing left but a Mechanical life, was the characteristic of that 
century. For the common man, unless happily he stood 
helow his century and belonged to another prior one, it was 
impossible to be a Believer, a Hero; he lay buried, uncon- 
scious, under these baleful influences. To the strongest 
man, only with infinite struggle and confusion was it pos- 
sible to work himself half-loose; and lead as it were, in an 
enchanted, most tragical way, a spiritual death-in-life, and 
be a Half-Hero ! 

Scepticism is the name we give to all this; as the chief 
symptom, as the chief origin of all this. Concerning which 
so much were to be said ! It would take many Discourses, 
not a small fraction of one Discourse, to state what one 
feels about that Eighteenth Century and its ways. As in- 
deed this, and the like of this, which we now call Scepti- 
cism, is precisely the black malady and life-foe, against 
which all teaching and discoursing since man's life began 
has directed itself: the battle of Belief against Unbelief is 
the never-ending battle ! Neither is it in the way of crimi- 
nation that one would wish to speak. Scepticism, for that 
century, we must consider as the decay of old ways of be- 
lieving, the preparation afar off for new better and wider 
ways, — an inevitable thing. We will not blame men for it ; 
we will lament their hard fate. We will understand that 
destruction of old forms is not destruction of everlasting 
substances; that Scepticism, as sorrowful and hateful as we 
see it, is not an end but a beginning. 

The other day speaking, without prior purpose that way, 
of Bentham's theory of man and man's life, I chanced to call 
it a more beggarly one than Mahomet's. I am bound to 
say, now when it is once uttered, that such is my deliberate 



THE HERO AS MAN OF LETTERS 167 

opinion. Not that one would mean offence against the man 
Jeremy Bentham, or those who respect and beheve him. 
Bentham himself, and even the creed of Bentham, seems to 
me comparatively worthy of praise. It is a determinate 
heing what all the world, in a cowardly half-and-half man- 
ner,- was tending to be. Let us have the crisis; we shall 
either have death or the cure. I call this gross, steamen- 
gine Utilitarianism an approach towards new Faith. It 
was a laying-down of cant ; a saying to oneself : ''Well then, 
this world is a dead iron machine, the god of it Gravitation 
and selfish Hunger ; let us see what, by checking and balanc- 
ing, and good adjustment of tooth and pinion, can be made 
of it ! " Benthamism has something complete, manful, in 
such fearless committal of itself to what it finds true; you 
may call it Heroic, though a Heroism with its eyes put out ! 
It is the culminating point, and fearless ultimatum, of what 
lay in the half-and-half state, pervading man's whole exist- 
ence in that Eighteenth Century. It seems to me, all de- 
niers of Godhood, and all lip-believers of it, are bound to 
be Benthamites, if they have courage and honesty. Ben- 
thamism is an eyeless Heroism: the Human Species, like a 
hapless blinded Samson grinding in the Philistine Mill, 
clasps convulsively the pillars of its Mill; brings huge ruin 
down, but ultimately deliverance withal. Of Bentham I 
meant to say no harm. 

But this I do say, and would wish all men to know and 
lay to heart, that he who discerns nothing but Mechanism 
in the Universe has in the fatalest way missed the secret of 
the Universe altogether. That all Godhood should vanish 
out of men's conception of this Universe seems to me pre- 
cisely the most brutal error, — I will not disparage Heathen- 
ism by calling it a Heathen error, — that men could fall into. 
It is not true ; it is false at the very heart of it. A man who 
thinks so will think wrong about all things in the world; 
this original sin will vitiate all other conclusions he can 
form. One might call it the most lamentable of Delusions, 
— not forgetting Witchcraft itself ! Witchcraft worshipped 
at least a Uving Devil; but this worships a dead iron Devil; 



168 LECTURES ON HEROES 

no God, not even a Devil! — Whatsoever is noble, divine, 
inspired, drops thereby out of life. There remains every- 
where in life a despicable caput-mortuum; the mechanical 
hull, all soul fled out of it. How can a man act heroically? 
The 'Doctrine of Motives' will teach him that it is, under 
more or less disguise, nothing but a wretched love of Pleas- 
ure, fear of Pain; that Hunger, of applause, of cash, of 
whatsoever victual it may be, is the ultimate fact of man's 
life. Atheism, in brief; — which does indeed frightfully pun- 
ish itself. The man, I say, is become spiritually a paralytic 
man; this godlike Universe a dead mechanical steamengine, 
all working by motives, checks, balances, and I know not 
what; wherein, as in the detestable belly of some Phalaris'- 
Bull of his own contriving, he the poor Phalaris sits miser- 
ably dying! 

Belief I define to be the healthy act of a man's mind. 
It is a mysterious indescribable process, that of getting to 
believe; — ^indescribable, as all vital acts are. We have our 
mind given us, not that it may cavil and argue, but that it 
may see into something, give us clear belief and under- 
standing about something, whereon we are then to proceed 
to act. Doubt, truly, is not itself a crime. Certainly we do 
not rush out, clutch-up the first thing we find, and straight- 
way believe that! All manner of doubt, inquiry, (Txi4'tg as 
it is named, about all manner of objects, dwells in every 
reasonable mind. It is the mystic working of the mind, on 
the object it is getting to know and believe. Belief comes 
out of all this, above ground, like the tree from its hidden 
roots. But now if, even on common things, we require that 
a man keep his doubts silent, and not babble of them till 
they in some measure become affirmations or denials; how 
much more in regard to the highest things, impossible to 
speak-of in words at all ! That a man parade his doubt, and 
get to imagine that debating and logic (which means at best 
only the manner of telling us your thought, your belief or 
disbelief, about a thing) is the triumph and true work of 
what intellect he has : alas, this is as if you should overturn 
the tree, and instead of green boughs, leaves and fruits, 



THE HERO AS MAN OF LETTERS 169 

show us ugly taloned roots turned-up into the air, — and no 
growth, only death and misery going-on ! 

For the Scepticism, as I said, is not intellectual only; 'it 
is moral also; a chronic atrophy and disease of the whole 
soul. A man lives by believing something; not by debat- 
ing and arguing about many things. A sad case for him 
when all that he can manage to beheve is something he can 
button in his pocket, and with one or the other organ eat 
and digest ! Lower than that he will not get. We call those 
ages in which he gets so low the mournfulest, sickest and 
meanest of all ages. The world's heart is palsied, sick: 
how can any hmb of it be whole? Genuine Acting ceases in 
all departments of the world's work; dextrous Similitude 
of Acting begins. The world's wages are pocketed, the 
world's work is not done. Heroes have gone-out; Quacks 
have come-in. Accordingly, what Century, since the end 
of the Roman world, which also was a time of scepticism, 
simulacra and universal decadence, so abounds with 
Quacks as that Eighteenth? Consider them, with their 
tumid sentimental vapouring about virtue, benevolence, — 
the wretched Quack-squadron, Cagliostro at the head of 
them! Few men were without quackery; they had got to 
consider it a necessary ingredient and amalgam for truth. 
Chatham, our brave Chatham himself, comes down to the 
House, all wrapt and bandaged; he 'has crawled out in 
great bodily suffering,' and so on; — forgets, says Walpole, 
that he is acting the sick man ; in the fire of debate, snatches 
his arm from the sling, and oratorically swings and brand- 
ishes it ! Chatham himself lives the strangest mimetic life, 
half-hero, half-quack, all along. For indeed the world is 
full of dupes; and you have to gain the world's suffrage! 
How the duties of the world will be done in that case, what 
quantities of error, which means failure, which means sor- 
row and misery, to some and to many, will gradually accu- 
mulate in all provinces of the world's business, we need not 
compute. 

It seems to me, you lay your finger here on the heart of 
the world's maladies, when you call it a Sceptical World. 



170 LECTURES ON HEROES 

An insincere world; a godless untruth of a world ! It is out 
of this, as I consider, that the whole tribe of social pesti- 
lences, French Revolutions, Chartisms, and what not, have 
derived their being, — their chief necessity to be. This 
must alter. Till this alter, nothing can beneficially alter. 
My one hope of the world, my inexpugnable consolation in 
looking at the miseries of the world, is that this is altering. 
Here and there one does now find a man who knows, as of 
old, that this world is a Truth, and no Plausibility and 
Falsity; that he himself is alive, not dead or paralytic; 
and that the world is alive, instinct with Godhood, beauti- 
ful and awful, even as in the beginning of days*! One man 
once knowing this, many men, all men, must by and by 
come to know it. It lies there clear, for whosoever will take 
the spectacles off his eyes and honestly look, to know ! For 
such a man the Unbelieving Century, with its unblessed 
Products, is already past: a new century is already come. 
The old unblessed Products and Performances, as solid as 
they look, are Phantasms, preparing speedily to vanish. To 
this and the other noisy, very great-looking Simulacrum 
with the whole world huzzahing at its heels, he can say, 
composedly stepping aside: Thou art not true; thou art 
not extant, only semblant; go thy way! — Yes, hollow 
Formulism, gross Benthamism, and other unheroic atheis- 
tic Insincerity is visibly and even rapidly declining. An 
unbelieving Eighteenth Century is but an exception, — such 
as now and then occurs. I prophesy that the world will 
once more become sincere; a believing world; with many 
Heroes in it, a heroic world! It will then be a victorious 
world; never till then. 

Or indeed what of the world and its victories? Men 
speak too much about the world. Each one of us here, let 
the world go how it will, and be victorious or not victorious, 
has he not a Life of his own to lead? One Life; a httle 
gleam of Time between two Eternities; no second chance 
to us forevermore! It were well for us to live not as fools 
and simulacra, but as wise and realities. The world's being 
saved will not save us; nor the world's being lost destroy 



THE HERO AS MAN OF LETTERS 171 

US. We should look to ourselves : there is great merit here 
in the ' duty of staying at home ' ! And, on the whole, to say 
truth, I never heard of ' worlds' being ' saved ' in any other 
way. That mania of saving worlds is itself a piece of the 
Eighteenth Century with its windy sentimentalism. Let us 
not follow it too far. For the saving of the world I will 
trust confidently to the Maker of the world; and look a 
little to my own saving, which I am more competent to ! — 
In brief, for the world's sake, and for our own, we will re- 
joice greatly that Scepticism, Insincerity, Mechanical Athe- 
ism, with all their poison-dews, are going, and as good as 
gone. — 

Now it was under such conditions, in those times of 
Johnson, that our Men of Letters had to live. Times in 
which there was properly no truth in life. Old truths had 
fallen nigh dumb; the new lay yet hidden, not trying to 
speak. That Man's Life here below was a Sincerity and 
Fact, and would forever continue such, no new intimation, 
in that dusk of the world, had yet dawned. No intimation; 
not even any French Revolution, — which we define to be a 
Truth once more, though a Truth clad in hellfire! How 
different was the Luther's pilgrimage, with its assured goal, 
from the Johnson's, girt with mere traditions, suppositions, 
grown now incredible, unintelligible ! Mahomet's Formulas 
were of ' wood waxed and oiled,' and could be burnt out of 
one's way : poor Johnson's were far more difficult to burn. 
■ — The strong man will ever find work, which means diffi- 
culty, pain, to the full measure of his strength. But to 
make-out a victory, in those circumstances of our poor 
Hero as Man of Letters, was perhaps more difficult than in 
any. Not obstruction, disorganisation. Bookseller Osborne 
and Fourpence-half penny a day; not this alone; but the 
light of his own soul was taken from him. No landmark on 
the Earth; and, alas, what is that to having no loadstar in 
the Heaven ! We need not wonder that none of those Three 
men rose to victory. That they fought truly is the highest 
praise. With a mournful sympathy we will contemplate, if 
not three living victorious Heroes, as I said, the Tombs of 



172 LECTURES ON HEROES 

three fallen Heroes! They fell for us too; making a way 
for us, Thei:e are the mountains which they hurled abroad 
in their confused War of the Giants; under which, their 
strength and life spent, they now lie buried. 

I have already written of these three Literary Heroes, 
expressly or incidentally ; what I suppose is known to most 
of you; what need not be spoken or written a second time. 
They concern us here as the singular Prophets of that singu- 
lar age; for such they virtually were; and the aspect they 
and their world exhibit, under this point of view, might 
lead us into reflections enough! I call them, all three, 
Genuine Men more or less; faithfully, for most part uncon- 
sciously, struggling to be genuine, and plant themselves on 
the everlasting truth of things. This to a degree that emi- 
nently distinguishes them from the poor artificial mass of 
their contemporaries; and renders them worthy to be con- 
sidered as Speakers, in some measure, of the everlasting 
truth, as Prophets in that age of theirs. By Nature herself 
a noble necessity was laid on them to be so. They v/ere 
men of such magnitude that they could not live on unreal- 
ities, — clouds, froth and all inanity gave-way under them: 
there was no footing for them but on firm earth; no rest or 
regular motion for them, if they got not footing there. To 
a certain extent, they were Sons of Nature once more in an 
age of Artifice; once more. Original Men. 

As for Johnson, I have always considered him to be, by 
nature, one of our great Enghsh souls. A strong and noble 
man; so much left undeveloped in him to the last; in a 
''kindlier element what might he not have be6n, — Poet, 
Priest, sovereign Ruler! On the whole, a man must not 
complain of his 'element,' of his 'time,' of the like; it is 
thriftless work doing so. His time is bad: well then, he is 
there to make it better! — Johnson's youth was poor, iso- 
lated, hopeless, very miserable. Indeed, it does not seem 
possible that, in any the favourablest outward circum- 
stances, Johnson's life could have been other than a painful 
one. The world might have had more of profitable work 



THE HERO AS MAN OF LETTERS 173 

out of him, or less; but his effort against the world's work 
could never have been a light one. Nature^ in return for 
his nobleness, had said to him, Live in an element of dis- 
eased sorrow. Nay, perhaps the sorrow and the nobleness 
were intimately and even inseparably connected with each 
other. At all events, poor Johnson had to go about girt 
with continual hypochondria, physical and spiritual pain. 
Like a Hercules with the burning Nessus'-shirt on him, 
which shoots-in on him dull incurable misery : the Nessus'- 
shirt not to be stript-off , which is his own natural skin ! In 
this manner he had to live. Figure him there, with his 
scrofulous diseases, with his great greedy heart, and un- 
speakable chaos of thoughts; stalking mournful as a 
stranger in this Earth; eagerly devouring what spiritual 
thing he could come at : school-languages and other merely 
grammatical stuff, if there were nothing better ! The largest 
soul that was in all England; and provision made for it of 
' f ourpence-halfpenny a day.' Yet a giant invincible soul; 
a true man's. One remembers always that story of the 
shoes at Oxford: the rough, seamy-faced, rawboned College 
Servitor stalking about, in winter-season, with his shoes 
worn-out; how the charitable Gentleman Commoner se- 
cretly places a new pair at his door; and the rawboned 
Servitor, lifting them, looking at them near, with his dim 
eyes, with what thoughts, — pitches them out of window! 
Wet feet, mud, frost, hunger or what you will ; but not beg- 
gary: we cannot stand beggary! Rude stubborn self-help 
here; a whole world of squalor, rudeness, confused misery 
and want, yet of nobleness and manfulness withal. It is a 
type of the man's Hfe, this pitching-away of the shoes. An 
original man; — not a secondhand, borrowing or begging 
man. Let us stand on our own basis, at any rate ! On such 
shoes as we ourselves can get. On frost and mud, if you 
will, but honestly on that ; — on the reality and substance of 
which Nature gives us, not on the semblance, on the thing 
she has given another than us ! — 

And yet with all this rugged pride of manhood and self- 
help, was there ever soul more tenderly affectionate, loyally 



174 LECTURES ON HEROES 

submissive to what was really higher than he? Great souls 
are always loyally submissive, reverent to what is over 
them; only small mean souls are otherwise. I could not 
find a better proof of what I said the other day, That the 
sincere man was by nature the obedient man ; that only in 
a World of Heroes was there loyal Obedience to the Heroic. 
The essence of originality is not that it be new: Johnson 
believed altogether in the old; he found the old opinions 
credible for him, fit for him; and in a right heroic manner 
lived under them. He is well worth study in regard to that. 
For we are to say that Johnson was far other than a mere 
man of words and formulas; he was a man of truths and 
facts. He stood by the old formulas; the happier was it 
for him that he could so stand : but in all formulas that he 
could stand by, there needed to be a most genuine sub- 
stance. Very curious how, in that poor Paper-age, so bar- 
ren, artificial, thick-quilted with Pedantries, Hearsays, the 
great Fact of this Universe glared in, forever wonderful, 
indubitable, "unspeakable, divine-infernal, upon this man 
too! How he harmonised his Formulas with it, how he 
managed at all under such circumstances: that is a thing 
worth seeing. A thing ' to be looked at with reverence, with 
pity, with awe.' That Church of St. Clement Danes, where 
Johnson still worshipped in the era of Voltaire, is to me a 
venerable place. 

It was in virtue of his sincerity, of his speaking still in 
some sort from the heart of Nature, though in the current 
artificial dialect, that Johnson was a Prophet. Are not all 
dialects 'artificial?' Artificial things are not all false;- — nay 
every true Product of Nature will infallibly shape itself; we 
may say all artificial things are, at the starting of them, 
true. What we call 'Formulas' are not in their origin bad; 
they are indispensably good. Formula is method, habi- 
tude; found wherever man is found. Formulas fashion 
themselves as Paths do, as beaten Highways, leading tow- 
ards some sacred or high object, whither many men are 
bent. Consider it. Qne man, full of heartfelt earnest im- 
pulse, finds-out a way of doing somewhat, — were it of utter- 



d 



THE HERO AS MAN OF LETTERS 175 

ing his soul's reverence for the Highest, were it but of fitly 
saluting his fellow-man. An inventor was needed to do that , 
a jpoet; he has articulated the dim-struggling thought that 
dwelt in his own and many hearts. This is his way of doing 
that; these are his footsteps, the beginning of a 'Path.' 
And now see : the second man travels naturally in the foot- 
steps of his foregoer, it is the easiest method. In the foot- 
steps of his foregoer; yet with improvements, with changes 
where such seem good; at all events with enlargements, the 
Path ever widening itself as more travel it; — till at last 
there is a broad Highway whereon the whole world may 
travel and drive. While there remains a City or Shrine, or 
any Reality to drive to, at the farther end, the Highway 
shall be right welcome ! When the City is gone, we will for- 
sake the Highway. In this manner all Institutions, Prac- 
tices, Regulated Things in the world have come into exist- 
ence, and gone out of existence. Formulas all begin by 
being full of substance; you may call them the skin, the 
articulation into shape, into limbs and skin, of a substance 
that is already there: they had not been there otherwise. 
Idols, as we said, are not idolatrous till they become doubt- 
ful, empty for the worshipper's heart. Much as we talk 
against Formulas, I hope no one of us is ignorant withal of 
the high significance of true Formulas ; that they were, and 
will ever be, the indispensablest furniture of our habitation 

in this world. 

Mark, too, how Uttle Johnson boasts of his 'sincerity.' 
He has no suspicion of his being particularly sincere, — of 
his being particularly anything ! A hard-struggling, weary- 
hearted man, or ' scholar ' as he calls himself, trying hard to 
get some honest livelihood in the world, not to starve, but 
to live — ^without stealing! A noble unconsciousness is in 
him. He does not 'engrave Truth on his watch-seal;' no, 
but he stands by truth, speaks by it, works and lives by it. 
Thus it ever is. Think of it once more. The man whom 
Nature has appointed to do great things is, first of all, fur- 
nished with that openness to Nature which renders him 
incapable of being msincere ! To his large, open, deep-feel- 



176 LECTURES ON HEROES 

ing heart Nature is a Fact; all hearsay is hearsay; the un- 
speakable greatness of this Mystery of Life, let him acknowl- 
edge it or not, nay even though he seem to forget it or deny 
it, is ever present to him, — fearful and wonderful, on this 
hand and on that. He has a basis of sincerity; unrecog- 
nised, because never questioned or capable of question. 
Mirabeau, Mahomet, Cromwell, Napoleon: all the Great 
Men I ever heard-of have this as the primary material of 
them. Innumerable commonplace men are debating, are 
talking everywhere their commonplace doctrines, which 
they have learned by logic, by rote, at secondhand: to that 
kind of man all this is still nothing. He must have truth; 
truth which he feels to be true. How shall he stand other- 
wise? His whole soul, at all moments, in all ways, tells him 
that there is no standing. He is under thenoble necessity 
of being true. Johnson's way of thinking about this world 
is not mine, any more than Mahomet's was : but I recognise 
the everlasting element of heart-smcen^?/ i^ both; and see 
with pleasure how neither of them remains ineffectual. 
Neither of them is as chaff sown; in both of them is some- 
thing which the seed-field will grow. 

Johnson was a Prophet to his people; preached a Gospel 
to them, — as all like him always do. The highest Gospel he 
preached we may describe as a kind of Moral Prudence : ' in 
a world where much is to be done, and little is to be known,' 
see how you will do it ! A thing well worth preaching. ' A 
world where much is to be done, and little is to be known : ' 
do not sink yourselves in boundless bottomless abysses of 
Doubt, of wretched god-forgetting Unbelief; — you were 
miserable then, powerless, mad : how could you do or work 
at all? Such Gospel Johnson preached and taught; — 
coupled, theoretically and practically, with this other great 
Gospel, 'Clear your mind of Cant!' Have no trade with 
Cant : stand on the cold mud in the frosty weather, but let 
it be in your own real torn shoes : ' that will be better for 
you,' as Mahomet says! I call this, I call these two things 
joined together, a great Gospel, the greatest perhaps that 
was possible at that time. 



THE HERO AS MAN OF LETTERS 177 

Johnson's Writings, which once had such currency and 
celebrity, are now, as it were, disowned by the young gen- 
eration. It is not wonderful; Johnson's opinions are fast 
becoming obsolete : but his style of thinking and of Hving, 
we may hope, will never become obsolete. I find in John- 
son's Books the indisputablest traces of a great intellect and 
great heart; — ever welcome, under what obstructions and 
perversions soever. They are sincere words, those of his; 
he means things by them. A wondrous buckram style, — 
the best he could get to then; a measured grandiloquence, 
stepping or rather stalking along in a very solemn way, 
grown obsolete now ; sometimes a tumid size of phraseology 
not in proportion to the contents of it: all this you will 
put-up with. For the phraseology, tumid or not, has always 
something within it. So many beautiful styles and books, 
with nothing in them ; — a man is a maZefactor to the world 
who writes such! They are the avoidable kind! — Had 
Johnson left nothing but his Dictionary, one might have 
traced there a great intellect, a genuine man. Looking to 
its clearness of definition, its general solidity, honesty, in- 
sight and successful method, it may be called the best of all 
Dictionaries. There is in it a kind of architectural nobleness ; 
it stands there like a great solid square-built edifice, finished, 
symmetrically complete: you judge that a true Builder 
did it. 

One word, in spite of our haste, must be granted to poor 
Bozzy. He passes for a mean, inflated, gluttonous creature; 
and was so in many senses. Yet the fact of his reverence for 
Johnson will ever remain noteworthy. The foolish con- 
ceited Scotch Laird, the most conceited man of his time, 
approaching in such awestruck attitude the great dusty 
irascible Pedagogue in his mean garret there : it is a genuine 
reverence for Excellence; a worship for Heroes, at a time 
when neither Heroes nor worship were surmised to exist. 
Heroes, it would seem, exist always, and a certain worship 
of them! We will also take the liberty to deny altogether 
that of the witty Frenchman, that no man is a Hero to his 
valet-de-chambre. Or if so, it is not the Hero's blame, but 
12 



178 LECTURES ON HEROES 

the Valet's : that his soul, namely, is a mean valet-soul ! He 
expects his Hero to advance in royal stage-trappings, with 
measured step, trains borne behind him, trumpets sounding 
before him. It should stand rather. No man can be a Grand- 
Monarque to his valet-de-chambre. Strip your Louis Qua- 
torze of his king-gear, and there is left nothing but a poor 
forked raddish with a head fantastically carved; — admira- 
ble to no valet. The Valet does not know a Hero when he 
sees him ! Alas, no : it requires a kind of Hero to do that; — 
and one of the world's wants, in this as in other senses, is for 
most part want of such. 

On the whole, shall we not say, that Boswell's admiration 
was well bestowed; that he could have found no soul in all 
England so worthy of bending down before? Shall we not 
say, of this great mournful Johnson too, that he guided his 
difficult confused existence wisely; led it well, Hke a right- 
valiant man? That waste chaos of Authorship by trade; 
that waste chaos of Scepticism in religion and politics, in 
life-theory and life-practice; in his poverty, in his dust and 
dimness, with the sick body and the rusty coat : he made it 
do for him, like a brave man. Not wholly without a loadstar 
in the Eternal; he had still a loadstar, as the brave all need 
to have : with his eye set on that, he would change his course 
for nothing in these confused vortices of the lower sea of 
Time. ' To the Spirit of Lies,' bearing death and hunger, he 
'would in no wise strike his flag.' Brave old Samuel: ulti- 
mus Romanorum! 

Of Rousseau and his Heroism I cannot say so much. He 
is not what I call a strong man. A morbid, excitable, spas- 
modic man; at best, intense rather than strong. He had 
not 'the talent of Silence,' an invaluable talent; which few 
Frenchmen, or indeed men of any sort in these times, excel 
in! The suffering man ought really 'to consume his own 
smoke;' there is no good in emitting smoke till you have 
made it into jire, — which, in the metaphorical sense too, all 
smoke is capable of becoming ! Rousseau has not depth or 
width, not calm force for difficulty; the first characteristic 



THE HERO AS MAN OF LETTERS 179 

of true greatness. A fundamental mistake to call vehe- 
mence and rigidity strength! A man is not strong who 
takes convulsion-fits; though six men cannot hold him 
then. He that can walk under the heaviest weight without 
staggering, he is the strong man. We need forever, espe- 
cially in these loud-shrieking days, to remind ourselves of 
that. A man who cannot hold his peace, till the time come 
for speaking and acting, is no right man. 

Poor Rousseau's face is to me expressive of him. A high 
but narrow contracted intensity in it: bony brows; deep, 
strait-set eyes, in which there is something bewildered-look- 
ing, — bewildered, peering with lynx-eagerness. A face full 
of misery, even ignoble misery, and also of the antagonism 
against that; something mean, plebeian there, redeemed 
only by intensity: the face of what is called a Fanatic, — a 
sadly contracted Hero ! We name him here because, with all 
his drawbacks, and they are many, he has the first and chief 
characteristic of a Hero : he is heartily in earnest. In earn- 
est, if ever man was ; as none of these French Philosophers 
were. Nay, one would say, of an earnestness too great for 
his otherwise sensitive, rather feeble nature; and which 
indeed in the end drove him into the strangest incoherences, 
almost delirations. There had come, at last, to be a kind of 
madness in him : his Ideas possessed him like demons ; hur- 
ried him so about, drove him over steep places ! — 

The fault and misery of Rousseau was what we easily 
name by a single word. Egoism; which is indeed the source 
and summary of all faults and miseries whatsoever. He had 
not perfected himself into victory over mere Desire; a mean 
Hunger, in many sorts, was still the motive principle of him. 
I am afraid he was a very vain man ; hungry for the praises 
of men. You remember Genlis's experience of him. She 
took Jean Jacques to the Theatre; he bargaining for a strict 
incognito, — '^He would not be seen there for the world!" 
The curtain did happen nevertheless to be drawn aside; the 
Pit recognised Jean Jacques, but took no great notice of 
him ! He expressed the bitterest indignation ; gloomed all 
evening, spake no other than surly words. The glib Count- 



180 LECTURES ON HEROES 

'ess remained entirely convinced that his anger was not at 
being seen, but at not being applauded when seen. How 
the whole nature of the man is poisoned; nothing but sus- 
picion, self-isolation, fierce moody ways ! He could not live 
with anybody. A man of some rank from the country, who 
visited him often, and used to sit with him, expressing all 
reverence and affection for him, comes one day, finds Jean 
Jacques full of the sourest unintelligible humour. "Mon- 
sieur," said Jean Jacques, with flaming eyes, ''I know why 
you come here. You come to see what a poor life I lead; 
how little is in my poor pot that is boiling there. Well, look 
into the pot ! There is half a pound of meat, one carrot and 
three onions ; that is all : go and tell the whole world that, 
if you Hke, Monsieur!" — A man of this sort was far gone. 
The whole world got itself supplied with anecdotes, for 
light laughter, for a certain theatrical interest, from these 
perversions and contortions of poor Jean Jacques. Alas, to 
him they were not laughing or theatrical ; too real to him ! 
The contortions of a dying gladiator: the crowded amphi- 
theatre looks-on with entertainment; but the gladiator is 
in agonies and dying. 

And yet this Rousseau, as we say, with his passionate 
appeals to Mothers, with his Contrat-social, with his celebra- 
tions of Nature, even of savage li^e in Nature, did once more 
touch upon Reality, struggle towards Reality; was doing 
the function of a Prophet to his Time. As he could, and as 
the Time could! Strangely through all that defacement, 
degradation and almost madness, there is in the inmost 
heart of poor Rousseau a spark of real heavenly fire. Once 
more, out of the element of that withered mocking Philoso- 
phism. Scepticism and Persiflage, there has arisen in this 
man the ineradicable feeling and knowledge that this Life 
of ours is true; not a Scepticism, Theorem, or Persiflage, but 
a Fact, an awful Reality. Nature had made that revelation 
to him; had ordered him to speak it out. He got it spoken 
out; if not well and clearly, then ill and dimly, — as clearly 
as he could. Nay what are all errors and perversities of his, 
even those stealings of ribbons, aimless confused miseries 



THE HERO AS MAN OF LETTERS 181 

and vagabondisms, if we will interpret them kindly, but the 
blinkard dazzlement and staggerings* to and fro of a man 
sent on an errand he is too weak for, by a path he cannot 
yet find? Men are led by strange ways. One should have 
tolerance for a man, hope of him; leave him to try yet what 
he will do. While life lasts, hope lasts for every man. 

Of Rousseau's literary talents, greatly celebrated still 
among his countrymen, I do not say much. His Books, like 
himself, are what I call unhealthy; not the good sort of 
Books. There is a sensuality in Rousseau. Combined with 
such an intellectual gift as his, it makes pictures of a certain 
gorgeous attractiveness : but they are not genuinely poeti- 
cal. Not white sunlight: something operatic; a kind of 
rosepink, artificial bedizenment. It is frequent, or rather it 
is universal, among the French since his time. Madame de 
Stael has something of it; St. Pierre; and down onwards to 
the present astonishing convulsionary 'Literature of Des- 
peration,' it is everywhere abundant. That same rosepink 
is not the right hue. Look at a Shakspeare, at a Goethe, 
even at a Walter Scott! He who has once seen into this, 
has seen the difference of the True from the Sham-True, and 
will discriminate them ever afterwards. 

We had to observe in Johnson how much good a Prophet, 
under all disadvantages and disorganisations, can accom- 
pUsh for the world. In Rousseau we are called to look 
rather at the fearful amount of evil which, under such dis- 
organisation, may accompany the good. Historically it is a 
most pregnant spectacle, that of Rousseau. Banished into 
Paris garrets, in the gloomy company of his own Thoughts 
and Necessities there; driven from post to pillar; fretted, 
exasperated till the heart of him went mad, he had grown 
to feel deeply that the world was not his friend nor the 
world's law. It was expedient, if anyway possible, that 
such a man should not have been set in flat hostility with 
the world. He could be cooped into garrets, laughed at as 
a maniac, left to starve like a wild-beast in his cage; — but 
he could not be hindered from setting the world on fire. 
The French Revolution found its Evangelist in Rousseau. 



182 LECTURES ON HEROES 

His semi-delirious speculations on the miseries of civilised 
life, the preferability (5f the savage to the civilised, and such- 
like, helped well to produce a whole delirium in France gen- 
erally. True, you may well ask, What could the world, the 
governors of the world, do with such a man? Difficujt to say 
what the governors of the world could do with him ! What 
he could do with them is unhappily clear enough, — guillotine 
a great many of them! Enough now of Rousseau. 

It was a curious phenomenon, in the withered, unbeliev- 
ing, secondhand Eighteenth Century, that of a Hepo starting 
up, among the artificial pasteboard figures and productions, 
in the guise of a Robert Burns. Like a little well in the 
rocky desert places, — like a sudden splendour of Heaven in 
the artificial Vauxhall ! People knew not what to make of 
it. They took it for a piece of the Vauxhall fire-work ; alas, 
it let itself be so taken, though struggling half-blindly, as in 
bitterness of death, against that ! Perhaps no man had such 
a false reception from his fellow-men. Once more a very 
wasteful life-drama was enacted under the sun. - 

The tragedy of Burns's fife is known to all of you. Surely 
we may say, if discrepancy between place held and place 
merited constitute perverseness of lot for a man, no lot could 
be niore perverse than Burns's. Among those secondhand 
acting-figures, mimes for most part, of the Eighteenth Cen- 
tury, once more a giant Original Man; one of those men who 
reach down to the perennial Deeps, who take rank with the 
Heroic among men : and he was born in a poor Ayrshire hut. 
The largest soul of all the British lands came among us in the 
shape of a hardhanded Scottish Peasant. 

His Father, a poor toiling man, tried various things; 
did not succeed in any; was involved in continual difficul- 
ties. The Steward, Factor as the Scotch call him, used to 
send letters and threat enings, Burns says, ' which threw us 
all into tears.' The brave, hard-toiling, hard-suffering Fa- 
ther, his brave heroine of a wife; and those children, of 
whom Robert was one! In this Earth, so wide otherwise, 
no shelter for them. The letters 'threw us all into tears:' 



THE HERO AS MAN OF LETTERS 183 

figure it. The brave Father, I say always ; — a silent Hero 
and Poet ; without whom the son had never been a speaking 
one! Burns's Schoolmaster came afterwards to London, 
learnt what good society was ; but declares thslt in no meet- 
ing of men did he ever enjoy better discourse than at the 
hearth of this peasant. And his poor ^ seven acres of nur- 
sery-ground,' — not that, nor the miserable patch of clay- 
farm, nor anything he tried to get a living by, would prosper 
with him; he had a sore unequal battle all his days. But he 
stood to it valiantly; a wise, faithful, unconquerable man; — 
swallowing-down how many sore sufferings daily into si- 
lence; fighting like an unseen Hero, — nobody pubhshing 
newspaper paragraphs about his nobleness; voting pieces 
of plate to him ! However, he was not lost : nothing is lost. 
Robert is there; the outcome of him, — and indeed of many 
generations of such as him. 

This Burns appeared under every disadvantage: unin- 
structed, poor, born only to hard manual toil ; and writing, 
when it came to that, in a rustic special dialect, known only 
to a small province of the country he lived in. Had he writ- 
ten, even what he did write, in the general language of Eng- 
land, I doubt not he had already become universally recog- 
nised as being, or capable to be, one of our greatest men. 
That he should have tempted so many to penetrate through 
the rough husk of that dialect of his, is proof that there lay 
something far from common within it. He has gained a 
certain recognition, and is continuing to do so over all quar- 
ters of our wide Saxon world : wheresoever a Saxon dialect 
is spoken, it begins to be understood, by personal inspection 
of this and the other, that one of the most considerable 
Saxon men of the Eighteenth century was an Ayreshire 
Peasant named Robert Burns. Yes, I will say, here too was 
a piece of the right Saxon stuff: strong as the Harz-rock, 
rooted in the depths of the world; — rock, yet with wells of 
living softness in it! A wild impetuous whirlwind of pas- 
sion and faculty slumbered quiet there; such heavenly 
melody dwelling in the heart of it. A noble rough genuine- 
ness; homely, rustic, honest; true simplicity of strength; 



184 LECTURES ON HEROES 

with its lightning-fire, with its soft dewy pity; — like the old 
Norse Thor, the Peasant-god ! — 

Burns's Brother Gilbert, a man of much sense and worth, 
has told me that Robert, in his young days, in spite of their 
hardship, was usually the gayest of speech; a fellow of in- 
finite frolic, laughter, sense and heart; far pleasant er to hear 
there, stript cutting peats in the bog, or suchlike, than he 
ever afterwards knew him I can well believe it. This basis 
of mirth {'fond gaillard/ as old Marquis Mirabeau calls it), a 
primal-element of sunshine and joyfulness, coupled with his 
other deep and earnest qualities, is one of the most attrac- 
tive characteristics of Burns. A large fund of Hope dwells 
in him; spite of his tragical history, he is not a mourning 
man. He shakes his sorrows gallantly aside; bounds forth 
victorious over them. It is as the lion shaking ' dew-drops 
from his mane; ' as the swift-bounding horse, that laughs at 
the shaking of the spear. — But indeed, Hope, Mirth, of the 
sort like Burns's, are they not the outcome properly of 
warm generous affection, — such as is the beginning of all to 
every man? 

You would think it strange if 1 called Burns the most 
gifted British soul we had in all that century of his : and yet 
I believe the day is coming when there will be little danger 
in saying so. His writings, all that he did under such ob- 
structions, are only a poor fragment of him. Professor 
Stewart remarked very justly, what indeed is true of all 
Poets good for much, that his poetry was not any particular 
faculty ; but the general result of a naturally vigorous orig- 
inal mind expressing itself in that way. Burns's gifts, ex- 
pressed in conversation, are the theme of all that ever 
heard him. All kinds of gifts: from the gracefulest utter- 
ances of courtesy, to the highest fire of passionate speech; 
loud floods of mirth, soft wailings of affection, laconic 
emphasis, clear piercing insight; all was in him. Witty 
duchesses celebrate him as a man whose speech ' led them off 
their feet.' This is beautiful: but still more beautiful that 
which Mr. Lockhart has recorded, which I have more than 
once alluded to, How the waiters and ostlers at inns would 



THE HERO AS MAN OF LETTERS 185 

get out of bed, and come crowding to hear this man speak! 
Waiters and ostlers : — they too were men, and here was a 
man! I have heard much about his speech; but one of the 
best things I ever heard of it was, last year, from a vener- 
able gentleman long familiar with him. That it was speech 
distinguished by always having something in it. " He spoke 
rather little than much," this old man told me; " sat rather 
silent in those early days, as in the company of persons 
above him; and always when he did speak, it was to throw 
new light on the matter." I know not why any one should 
ever speak otherwise ! — But if we look at his general force of 
soul, his heslihy robustness everyway, the rugged downright- 
ness, penetration, generous valour and manfulness that was 
in him, — where shall we readily find a better-gifted man? 

Among the great men of the Eighteenth Century, I 
sometimes feel as if Burns might be found to resemble Mira- 
beau more than any other. They differ widely in vesture; 
yet look at them intrinsically. There is the same burly 
thick-necked strength of body as of soul; — built, in both 
cases, on what the old Marquis calls a fond gaillard. By 
nature, by course of breeding, indeed by nation, Mirabeau 
has much more of bluster; a noisy, forward, unresting man. 
But the characteristic of Mirabeau too is veracity and sense, 
power of true insight, superiority of vision. The thing that 
he says is worth remembering. It is a flash of insight into 
some object of other: so do both these men speak. The 
same raging passions; capable too "in both of manifesting 
themselves as the tenderest noble affections. Wit, wild 
laughter, energy, directness, sincerity: there were in both. 
The types of the two men are not dissimilar. Burns too 
could have governed, debated in National Assemblies; 
politicised, as few could. Alas, the courage which had to 
exhibit itself in capture of smuggling schooners in the Sol- 
way Frith; in keeping silence over so much, where no good 
speech, but only inarticulate rage was possible : this might 
have bellowed forth Ushers de Breze and the like ; and made 
itself visible to all men, in managing of kingdoms, in ruling of 
great and ever-memorable epochs ! But they said to him re- 



186 LECTURES ON HEROES 

provingly , his Official Superiors said, and wrote : ' You are to 
work, not think/ Of your thinking-isbCVilty , the greatest in 
this land, we have lio need; you are to gauge beer there; for 
that only are you wanted. Very notable; — and worth men- 
tioning, though we know what is to be said and answered ! 
As if Thought, Power of Thinking, were not, at all times, 
in all places and situations of the world, precisely the thing 
that was wanted. The fatal man, is he not always the un- 
thinking man, the man who cannot think and see; but only 
grope, and hallucinate, and m-issee the nature of the thing- 
he works with? He missees it, mistakes it as we say; takes 
it for one thing, and it is another thing, — and leaves him 
standing like a Futility there! He is the fatal man; unut- 
terably fatal, put in the high places of men. — " Why com- 
plain of this?" say some: "Strength is mournfully denied 
its arena; that was true from of old." Doubtless; and the 
worse for the arena, answer I! Complaining profits little; 
stating of the truth may profit. That a Europe, with its 
French Revolution just breaking out, finds no need of a 
Burns except for gauging beer, — is a thing I, for one, cannot 
rejoice at! — 

Once more we have to say here, that the chief quality of 
Burns is the sincerity of him. So in his Poetry, so in his 
Life. The Song he sings is not of fantasticalities ; it is of a 
thing felt, really there; the prime merit of this, as of all in 
him, and of his Life generally, is truth. The Life of Burns 
is what we may call a great tragic sincerity. A sort of sav- 
age sincerity, — not cruel, far from that; but wild, wrestling 
naked with the truth of things. In that sense, there is 
something of the savage in all great men. 

Hero-worship, — Odin, Burns? Well; these Men of Let- 
ters too were not without a kind of Hero-worship : but what 
a strange condition has that got into now ! The waiters and 
ostlers of Scotch inns, prying about the door, eager to catch 
any word that fell from Burns, were doing unconscious 
reverence to the Heroic. Johnson had his Boswell for wor- 
shipper. Rousseau had worshippers enough; princes call- 
ing on him in his mean garret; the great, the beautiful doing 



THE HERO AS MAN OF LETTERS 187 

reverence to the poor moonstruck man. For himself a most 
portentous contradiction; the two ends of his Hfe not to be 
brought into harmony. He sits at the tables of grandees; 
and has to copy music for his own living. He cannot even 
get his music copied. "By dint of dining out/' says he, " I 
run the risk of dying by starvation at home.'' For his wor- 
shippers too a most questionable thing! If doing Hero- 
worship well or badly be the test of vital wellbeing or illbeing 
to a generation, can we say that these generations are very 
first-rate? — And yet our heroic Men of Letters do teach, 
govern, are kings, priests, or what you like to call them; 
intrinsically there is no preventing it by any means what- 
ever. The world has to obey him who thinks and sees in the 
world. The world can alter the manner of that; can either 
have it as blessed continuous summer sunshine, or as un- 
blessed black thunder and tornado, — with unspeakable dif- 
ference of profit for the world! The manner of it is very 
alterable; the matter and fact of it is not alterable by any 
power under the sky. Light; or, failing that, lightning: 
the world can take its choice. Not whether we call an Odin 
god, prophet, priest, or what we call him; but whether we 
believe the word he tells us: there it all lies. If it be a true 
word, we shall have to believe it; believing it, we shall have 
to do it. What name or welcome' we give him or it, is a 
point that concerns ourselves mainly. It, the new Truth, 
new deeper revealing of the Secret of this Universe, is verily 
of the nature of a message from on high; and must and will 
have itself obeyed. — 

My last remark is on that notablest phasis of Burns's 
history, — his visit to Edinburgh. Often it seems to me as if 
his demeanour there were the highest proof he gave of what 
a fund of worth and genuine manhood was in him. If we 
think of it, few heavier burdens could be laid on the strength 
of a man. So sudden; all common Lionism, which ruins 
innumerable men, was as nothing to this. It is as if Napo- 
leon had been made a King of, not gradually, but at once 
from the Artillery Lieutenancy in the Regiment La Fere. 
Burns, still only in his twenty-seventh year, is no longer 



188 LECTURES ON HEROES 

even a ploughman; he is flying to the West Indies to escape 
disgrace and a jail. This month he is a ruined peasant, his 
wages seven pounds a year, and these gone from him : next 
month he is in the blaze of rank and beauty, handing down 
jewelled Duchesses to dinner; the cynosure of all eyes! 
Adversity is sometimes hard upon a man ; but for one man 
who can stand prosperity, there are a hundred that will 
stand adversity. I admire much the way in which Burns 
met all this. Perhaps no man one could point out, was ever 
so sorely tried, and so httle forgot himself. Tranquil, unas- 
tonished; not abashed, not inflated, neither awkwardness 
nor affectation: he feels that he there is the man Robert 
Burns; that the 'rank is but the guinea-stamp;' that the 
celebrity is but the candle-light, which will show what man, 
not in the least make him a better or other man ! Alas, it 
may readily, unless he look to it, make him a worse man; 
a wretched inflated wind-bag, — inflated till he hurst, and 
become a dead lion; for whom, as some one has said, Hhere 
is no resurrection of the body;' worse than a living dog! — 
Burns is admirable here. 

And yet, alas, as I have observed elsewhere, these Lion- 
hunters were the ruin and death of Burns. It was they that 
rendered it impossible for him to live! They gathered 
round him in his Farm; hindered his industry; no place 
was remote enough from them. He could not get his Lion- 
ism forgotten, honestly as he was disposed to do so. He 
falls into discontents, into miseries, faults ; the world getting 
ever more desolate for him; health, character, peace of 
mind all gone; — solitary enough now. It is tragical to 
think of ! These men came but to see him; it was out of no 
sympathy with him, nor no hatred to him. They came to 
get a little amusement: they got their amusement; — and 
the Hero's life went for it ! 

Richter gays, in the Island of Sumatra there is a kind of 
' Light-chafers,' large Fire-flies, which people stick upon spits, 
and illuminate the ways with at night. Persons of condition 
can thus travel with a pleasant radiance, which they much 
admire. Great honour to the Fire-flies ! But — ! — 



LECTURE VI. 

THE HERO AS KING. CROMWELL, NAPOLEON: MODERN 
REVOLUTIONISM. 

[Friday, 22d May, 1840.] 

We come now to the last form of Heroism ; that which we 
call Kingship. The Commander over Men; he to whose 
will our wills are to be subordinated, and loyally surrender 
themselves, and find their welfare in doing so, may be reck- 
oned the most important of Great Men. He is practically 
the summary for us of all the various figures of Heroism; 
Priest, Teacher, whatsoever of earthly or of spiritual dignity 
we can fancy to reside in a man, embodies itself here, to 
command over us, to furnish us with constant practical 
teaching, to tell us for the day and hour what we are to do. 
He is called Rex, Regulator, Roi: our own name is still bet- 
ter; King, Konning, which means Can-ning, Able-man. 

Numerous considerations, pointing towards deep, ques- 
tionable, and indeed unfathomable regions, present them- 
selves here : on the most of which we must resolutely for the 
present forbear to speak at all. As Burke said that perhaps 
fair Trial by Jury was the soul of Government, and that all 
legislation, administration, parliamentary debating, and the 
rest of it, went on, in ' order to bring twelve impartial men 
into a jury-box;' — so, by much stronger reason, may I say 
here, that the finding of your Ableman and getting him 
invested with the symbols of ability, with dignity, worship 
(worth-shiY)) , royalty, kinghood, or whatever we call it, so 
that he may actually have room to guide according to his 
faculty of doing it, — is the business, well or ill accomplished, 
of all social procedure whatsoever in this world ! Hustings- 
speeches, ParUamentary motions. Reform Bills^'' French 

189 



190 LECTURES ON HEROES 

t 

Revolutions, all mean at heart this ; or else nothing. Find 
in any country the Ablest Man that exists there; raise him 
to the supreme place, and loyally reverence him : you have 
a perfect government for that country; no ballot-box, par- 
liamentary eloquence, voting, constitution-building, or other 
machinery whatsoever can improve it a whit. It is in the 
perfect state ; an ideal country. The Ablest Man; he means 
also the truest-hearted, justest, the Noblest Man: what he 
tells us to do must be precisely the wisest, fittest, that we 
could anywhere or anyhow learn; — the thing which it will 
in all ways behove us, with right loyal thankfulness, and 
nothing doubting, to do ! Our doing and life were then, so 
far as government could regulate it, well regulated; that 
were the ideal of constitutions. 

Alas, we know very well that Ideals can never be com- 
pletely embodied in practice. Ideals must ever lie a very 
great way off; and we will right thankfully content our- 
selves with any not intolerable approximation thereto ! Let 
no man, as Schiller says, too querulously 'measure by a scale 
of perfection the meagre product of reality' in this poor 
world of ours. We will esteem him no wise man; we will 
esteem him a sickly, discontented, foolish man. And yet, 
on the other hand, it is never to be forgotten that Ideals do 
exist ; that if they be not approximated to at all, the whole 
matter goes to wreck ! Infallibly. No bricklayer builds a 
wall perfectly perpendicular, mathematically this is not 
possible; a certain degree of perpendicularity suffices him; 
and he, hke a good bricklayer, who must have done with his 
job, leaves it so. And yet if he sway too much from the per- 
pendicular; above all, if he throw plummet and level quite 
a\\ay from him, and pile brick on brick heedless, just as it 
comes to hand — ! Such bricklayer, I think, is in a bad way. 
He has forgotten himself: but the Law of Gravitation does 
not forget to act on him; he and his wall rush-down into 
confused welter of ruin ! — 

This is the history of all rebeUions, French Revolutions, 
social explosions in ancient or modern times. You have put 
the too L^nable Man at the head of affairs ! The too ignoble, 



THE HERO AS KING 191 

unvaliant, fatuous man. You have forgotten that there is 
any rule, or natural necessity whatever, of putting the Able 
Man there. Brick must lie on brick as it may and can. 
Unable Simulacrum of Ability, quack, in a word, must adjust 
himself with quack, in all manner of administration of hu- 
man things; — which accordingly lie unadministered, fer- 
menting into unmeasured masses of failure, of indigent 
misery: in the outward, and in the inward or spiritual, 
miserable millions stretch-out the hand for their due sup- 
ply, and it is not there. The ' law of gravitation ' acts ; Na- 
ture's laws do none of them forget to act. The miserable 
millions burst-forth into Sansculottism, or some other sort 
of madness : bricks and bricklayer lie as a fatal chaos ! — 

Much sorry stuff, written some hundred years ago or 
more, about the 'Divine right of Kings,' moulders unread 
now in the PubHc Libraries of this country. Far be it from 
us to disturb the calm process by which it is disappearing 
harmlessly from the earth, in those repositories! At the 
same time, not to let the immense rubbish go without leav- 
ing us, as it ought, some soul of it behind — I will say that it 
did mean something; something true, which it is important 
for us and all men to keep in mind. To assert that in what- 
ever man you chose to lay hold of (by this or the other plan 
of clutching at him) ; and clapt a round piece of metal on 
the head of, and called King, — there straightway came to 
reside a divine virtue, so that he became a kind of god, and 
a Divinity inspired him with faculty and right to rule over 
you to all lengths : this, — what can we do with this but leave 
it to rot silently in the Public" Libraries? But I will say 
withal, and that is what these Divine-right men meant, 
That in Kings, and in all human Authorities, and relations 
that men god-created can form among each other, there is 
verily either a Divine Right or else a Diabolic Wrong; one 
or the other of these two ! For it is false altogether, what 
the last Sceptical Century taught us, that this world is a 
steamengine. There is a God in this world; and a God's- 
sanction, or else the violation of such, dbes look-out from 
all ruHng and obedience, from all moral acts of men. There 



192 LECTURES ON HEROES 

is no act more moral between men than that of rule and 
obedience. Woe to him that claims obedience when it is 
not due; woe to him that refuses it when it is! God's law 
is in that, I say, however the Parchment-laws may run: 
there is a Divine Right or else a Diabolic Wrong at the heart 
of every claim that one man makes upon another. 

It can do none of us harm to reflect on this: in all the 
relations of life it will concern us ; in Loyalty and Royalty, 
the highest of these. I esteem the modern error, That all 
goes by self-interest and the checking and balancing of 
greedy knaveries, and that, in short, there is nothing divine 
whatever in the association of men, a still more despicable 
error, natural as it is to an unbelieving century, than that of 
a ' divine right ' in people called Kings. I say. Find me the 
true Konning, King, or Able-man, and he has a divine right 
over me. That we knew in some tolerable measure how to 
find him, and that all men were ready to acknowledge his 
divine right when found : this is precisely the healing which 
a sick world is everywhere, in these ages, seeking after ! The 
true King, as guide of the practical, has ever something of 
the Pontiff in him, — guide of the spiritual, from which all 
practice has its rise. This too is a true saying. That the 
King is head of the Church. — But we will leave the Polemic 
stuff of a dead century to lie quiet on its bookshelves. 

Certainly it is a fearful business, that of having your 
Able-man to seek, and not knowing in what manner to pro- 
ceed about it ! That is the world's sad predicament in these 
times of ours. They are times of revolution, and have long 
been. The bricklayer with his bricks, no longer heedful of 
plummet or of the law of gravitation, have toppled, tumbled, 
and it all welters as we see ! But the beginning of it was not 
the French Revolution ; that is rather the end, we can hope. 
It were truer to say, the beginning was three centuries far- 
ther back : in the Reformation of Luther. That the thing 
which still called itself Christian Church had become a False- 
hood, and brazenly went about pretending to pardon men's 
sins for metallic coined money, and to do much else which 



THE HERO AS KING 193 

in the everlasting truth of Nature it did not now do : here 
lay the vital malady. The inward being wrong, all outward 
went ever more and more wrong. Belief died away; all was 
Doubt, Disbehef . The builder cast away his plummet ; said 
to himself, ''What is gravitation? Brick Hes on brick 
there ! " Alas, does it not still sound strange to many of us, 
the assertion that there is a God's-truth in the business of 
god-created men; that all is not a kind of grimace, an 'ex- 
pediency, ' diplomacy, one knows not what ! — 

From that first necessary assertion of Luther's, "You, 
self-styled Papa, you are no Father in God at all ; you are — 
a Chimera, whom I know not how to name in polite lan- 
guage ! " — from that onwards to the shout which rose round 
CamilleDesmoulinsin the Palais-Royal, "Aux armes! " when 
the people had burst-up against all manner of Chimeras, — 
I find a natural historical sequence. That shout too, so 
frightful, half -infernal, was a great matter. Once more the 
voice of awakened nations; — starting confusedly, as out of 
nightmare, as out of death-sleep, into some dim feeling that 
Life was real; that God's- world was not an expediency and 
diplomacy ! Infernal ; — yes, since they would not have it 
otherwise. Infernal, since not celestial or terrestrial ! Hol- 
lowness, insincerity has to cease ; sincerity of some sort has 
to begin. Cost what it may, reigns of terror, horrors of 
French Revolution or what else, we have to return to truth. 
Here is a Truth, as I said : a Truth clad in hellfire, since they 
would not but have it so ! — 

A common theory among considerable parties of men in 
England and elsewhere used to be, that the French Nation 
had, in those days, as it were gone mad; that the French 
Revolution was a general act of insanity, a temporary con- 
version of France and large sections of the world into a kind 
of Bedlam. The Event had risen and raged; but it was a 
madness and nonentity, — gone now happily into the region 
of Dreams and the Picturesque! — To such comfortable 
philosophers, the Three Days of July 1830 must have been 
a surprising phenomenon. Here is the French Nation risen 
again, in musketry and death-struggle, out shooting and 
13 



194 LECTURES ON HEROES 

being shot, to make that same mad French Revolution good! 
The sons and grandsons of those men, it would seem, persist 
in the enterprise: they do not disown it; they will have it 
made good; will have themselves shot, if it be not made 
good ! To philosophers who had made-up their life-system 
on that 'madness' quietus, no phenomenon could be more 
alarming. Poor Niebuhr, they say, the Prussian Professor 
and Historian, fell broken-hearted in consequence ; sickened, 
if we can believe it, and died of the Three Days ! It was 
surely not a very heroic death; — little better than Racine's, 
dying because Louis Fourteenth looked sternly on him once. 
The world had stood some considerable shocks, in its time; 
might have been expected to survive the Three Days too, 
and be found turning on its axis after even them ! The Three 
Days told all mortals that the old French Revolution, mad 
as it might look, was not a transitory ebullition of Bedlam, 
but a genuine product of this Earth where we all live ; that 
it was verily a Fact, and that the world in general would 
do well everywhere to regard it as such. 

Truly, without the French Revolution, one would not 
know what to make of an age like this at all. We will hail 
the French Revolution, as shipwrecked mariners might the 
sternest rock, in a world otherwise all of baseless sea and 
waves. A true Apocalypse, though a terrible one, to this 
false withered artificial time; testifying once more that 
Nature is preternatural; if not .divine, then diabolic; that 
Semblance is not Reality; that it has to become Reality, or 
the world will take fire under it, — burn it into what it is, 
namely Nothing! Plausibility has ended; empty Routine 
has ended; much has ended. This, as with a Trump of 
Doom, has been proclaimed to all men. They are the wisest 
who will learn it soonest. Long confused generations before 
it be learned; peace impossible till it be ! The earnest man, 
surrounded, as ever, with a world of inconsistencies, can 
await patiently, patiently strive to do his work, in the midst 
of that. Sentence of Death is written down in Heaven 
against all that ; sentence of Death is now proclaimed on the 
Earth against it : this he with his eyes may see. And surely, 



THE HERO AS KING 195 

I should say, considering the other side of the matter, what 
enormous difficulties lie there, and how fast, fearfully fast, 
in all countries, the inexorable demand for solution of them 
is pressing on, — he may easily find other work to do than 
labouring in the Sansculottic province at this time of day ! 

To me, in these circumstances, that of 'Hero-worship' 
becomes a fact inexpressibly precious; the most solacing 
fact one sees in the world at present. There is an everlast- 
ing hope in it for the management of the world. Had all 
traditions, arrangements, creeds, societies that men ever 
instituted, sunk away, this would remain. The certainty of 
Heroes being sent us; our faculty, our necessity, to rever- 
ence Heroes when sent; it shines like a polestar through 
smoke-clouds, dust-clouds, and all manner of down-rushing 
and conflagration. 

Hero-worship would have sounded very strange to those 
workers and fighters in the French Revolution. Not rever- 
ence for Great Men; not any hope or belief, or even wish, 
that Great Men could again appear in the world ! Nature, 
turned into a 'Machine,' was as if effete now; could not any 
longer produce Great Men : — I can tell her, she may give-up 
the trade altogether, then; we cannot do without Great 
Men ! — But neither have I any quarrel with that of ' Liberty 
and Equality;' with the faith that, wise great men being 
impossible, a level immensity of foolish small men would 
suffice. It was a natural faith then and there. " Liberty 
and Equality; no Authority needed any longer. Hero- 
worship, reverence for such Authorities, has proved false, is 
itself a falsehood; no more of it! We have had such for- 
geries, we will now trust nothing. So many base plated 
coins passing in the market, the belief has now become com- 
mon that no gold any longer exists, — and even that we can 
do very well without gold!" I find this, among other 
things, in that universal cry of Liberty and Equality; and 
find it very natural, as matters then stood. 

And yet surely it is but the transition from false to true. 
Considered as the whole truth, it is false altogether; — the 
product of entire sceptical bhndness, as yet only struggling 



196 LECTURES ON HEROES 

to see. Hero-worship exists forever, and everywhere: not 
Loyalty alone; it extends from divine adoration down to 
the lowest practical regions of life. 'Bending before men/ 
if it is not to be a. mere empty grimace, better dispensed 
with than practised, is Hero-worship, — a recognition that 
there does dwell in that presence of our brother something 
divine; that every created man, as Nov alls said, is a 'revela- 
tion in the Flesh.' They were Poets too, that devised all 
those graceful courtesies which make Hfe noble ! Courtesy 
is not a falsehood or grimace; it need not be such. And 
Loyalty, religious Worship itself, are still possible ; nay still 
inevitable. 

May we not say, moreover, while so many of our late 
Heroes have worked rather as revolutionary men, that 
nevertheless every Great Man, every genuine man, is by 
the nature of him a son of Order, not of Disorder? It is a 
tragical position for a true man to work in revolutions. He 
seems an anarchist; and indeed a painful element of an- 
arch}^ does encumber him at every step, — him to whose 
whole soul anarchy is hostile, hateful. His mission is Order ; 
every man's is. He is here to make what was disorderly, 
chaotic, into a thing ruled, regular. He is the missionary 
of Order. Is not all work of man in this world a making of 
Order ? The carpenter finds rough trees ; shapes them, con- 
strains them into square fitness, into purpose and use. We 
are all born enemies of Disorder: it is tragical for us all to be 
concerned in image-breaking and down-pulling; for the 
Great Man, more a man than we, it is doubly tragical. 

Thus too all human things, maddest French Sansculot- 
tisms, do and must work towards Order. I say, there is not 
a man in them, raging in the thickest of the madness, but is 
impelled withal, at all moments, towards Order. His very 
life means that; Disorder is dissolution, death. No chaos 
but it seeks a centre to revolve round. While man is man, 
some Cromwell or Napoleon is the necessary finish of a Sans- 
culottism. — Curious: in those days when Hero-worship was 
the most incredible thing to every one, how it does come- 
out nevertheless, and assert itself practically, in a way which 



THE HERO AS KING 197 

all have to credit. Divine right, take it on the great scale, 
is found to mean divine might withal ! While old false For- 
mulas are getting trampled everywhere into destruction, 
new genuine Substances unexpectedly unfold themselves in- 
destructible. In rebellious ages, when Kingship itself seems 
dead and abolished, Cromwell, Napoleon step-forth again 
as 'Kings. The history of these men is what we have now to 
look at, as our last phasis of Heroism. The old agetj are 
brought back to us; the manner in which Kings were nade, 
and Kingship itself first took rise, is again exhibited in the 
history of these Two. 

We have had many civil- wars in England; wars of Red 
and White Roses, wars of Simon de Montfort; wars enough, 
which are not very memorable. But that war of the Puri- 
tans has a significance which belongs to no one of the others. 
Trusting to your candour, which will suggest on the other 
side what I have not room to say, I will call it a section oilce 
more of that great universal war which alone makes-up the 
true History of the World, — the war of Belief against Unbe- 
lief ! The struggle of men intent on the real essence of things, 
against men intent on the semblances and forms of things. 
The Puritans, to many, seem mere savage Iconoclasts, fierce 
destroyers of Forms; but it were more just to call them 
haters of untrue Forms. I hope we know how to respect 
Laud and his King as well as them. Poor Laud seems to me 
to have been weak and ill-starred, not dishonest; an uur 
fortunate Pedant rather than anything worse. His 'Dreams' 
and superstitions, at which they laugh so, have an affec- 
tionate, lovable kind of character. He is like a College- 
Tutor, whose whole world is forms. College-rules; whose 
notion is that these are the life and safety of the world. He 
is placed suddenly, with that unalterable luckless notion of 
his, at the head not of a College but of a Nation, to regulate 
the most complex deep-reaching interests of men. He 
thinks they ought to go by the old decent regulations; nay 
that their salvation will lie in extending and improving 
these. Like a weak man, he drives with spasmodic vehe- 



198 LECTURES ON HEROES 

mence towards his purpose ; cramps himself to it, heeding no 
voice of prudence, no cry of pity : He will have his College- 
rules obeyed by his Collegians; that first; and till that, 
nothing. He is an ill-starred Pedant, as I said. He would 
have it the world was a College of that kind, and the world 
was not that. Alas, was not his doom stern enough? What- 
ever wrongs he did, were they not all frightfully avenged'on 
him?^ 

It is meritorious to insist on forms ; Religion and all else 
naturally clothes itself in forms. Everywhere the formed 
world is the only habitable one. The naked formlessness 
of Puritanism is not the thing I praise in the Puritans; it 
is the thing I pity, — Upraising only the spirit which had ren- 
dered that inevitable ! All substances clothe themselves in 
forms : but there are suitable true forms, and then there are 
untrue unsuitable. As the briefest definition, one might 
say. Forms which grow round a substance, if we rightly 
understand that, will correspond to the real nature and pur- 
port of it, will be true, good; forms which are consciously 
jmt round a substance, bad. I invite you to reflect on this. 
It distinguishes true from false in Ceremonial Form, earnest 
solemnity from empty pageant, in all human things. 

There must be a veracity, a natural spontaneity in forms. 
In the commonest meeting of men, a person making, what 
we call, 'set speeches,' is not he an offence? In the mere 
drawing-room, whatsoever courtesies you see to be grimaces, 
prompted by no spontaneous reality within, are a thing you 
wish to get away from. But suppose now it were some 
matter of vital concernment, some transcendent matter (as 
Divine Worship is), about which your whole soul, struck 
dumb with its excess of feeling, knew not how to form itself 
into utterance at all, and preferred formless silence to any 
utterance there possible, — what should we say of a man 
coming forward to represent or utter it for you in the way 
of upholsterer-mummery? Such a man, — let him depart 
swiftly, if he love himself! You have lost your only son; 
are mute, struck down, without even tears : an importunate 
man importunately offers to celebrate Funeral Games for 



THE HERO AS KING 199 

him in the manner of the Greeks! Such mummery is not 
only not to be accepted, — it is hateful, unendurable. It is 
what the old Prophets called ' Idolatry, ' worshipping of hol- 
low shows; what all earnest men do and will reject. We can 
partly understand what those poor Puritans meant. Laud 
dedicating that St. Catherine Creed's Church, in the manner 
we have it described; with his multiplied ceremonial bow- 
ings, gesticulations, exclamations: surely it is rather the 
rigorous formal Pedant, intent on his ' College-rules, ' than 
the earnest Prophet, intent on the essence of the matter ! 

Puritanism found such forms insupportable; trampled 
on such forms; — we have to excuse it for saying, No form at 
all rather than such ! It stood preaching in its bare pulpit, 
with nothing but the Bible in its hand. Nay, a man preach- 
ing from his earnest soul into the earnest souls of men: is not 
this virtually the essence of all Churches whatsoever? The 
nakedest, savagest reality, I say, is preferable to any 
semblance, however dignified. Besides, it will clothe itself 
with due semblance by and by, if it be real. No fear of that ; 
actually no fear at all. Given the living man, there will be 
found cZo^/ies for him ; he will find himself clothes. But the 
suit-of-clothes pretending that it is both clothes and man — ! 
— ^We cannot 'fight the French' by three-hundred- thousand 
red uniforms; there must be men in the inside of them! 
Semblance, I assert, must actually not divorce itself from 
Reality. If Semblance do, — why then there must be men 
found to rebel against Semblance, for it has become a lie! 
These two Antagonisms at war here, in the case of Laud and 
the Puritans, are as old nearly as the world. They went to 
fierce battle. over England in that age; and f ought-out their 
confused controversy to a certain length, with many results 
for all of us. 

In the age which directly followed that of the Puritans, 
their cause or themselves were little likely to have justice 
done them. Charles Second and his Rochesters were not 
the kind of men you would set to judge what the worth or 
meaning of such men might have been. That there could 



200 LECTURES ON HEROES 

be any faith or truth in the hfe of a man, was what these poor 
Rochesters, and the age they ushered-in, had forgotten. 
Puritanism was hung on gibbets, — hke the bones of the lead- 
ing Puritans. Its work nevertheless went on accomplish- 
ing itself. All true work of a man, hang the author of it on 
what gibbet you like, must and will accomplish itself. We 
have our Haheas-Corpus, our free Representation of the 
People; acknowledgment, wide as the world, that all men 
are, or else must, shall, and will become, what we call free 
men;— men with their life grounded on reality and justice, 
not on tradition, which has become unjust and a chimera! 
This in part, and much besides this, was the work of the 
Puritans. 

And indeed, as these things became gradually manifest, 
the character of the Puritans began to clear itself. Their 
memories were, one after another, taken doivn from the gib- 
bet; nay a certain portion of them are now, in these days, 
as good as canonised. Eliot, Hampden, Pym, nay Ludlow, 
Hutchinson, Vane himself, are admitted to be a kind of 
Heroes; political Conscript Fathers, to whom in no small 
degree we owe what makes us a free England : it would not 
be safe for anybody to designate these men as wicked now. 
Few Puritans of note but find their apologists somewhere, 
and have a certain reverence paid them by earnest men. 
One Puritan, I think, and almost he alone, our poor Crom- 
well, seems to hang yet on the gibbet, and find no hearty 
apologist anywhere. Him neither saint nor sinner will 
acquit of great wickedness. A man of ability, infinite 
talent, courage, and so forth: but he betrayed the Cause. 
Selfish ambition, dishonesty, duplicity; a fierce, coarse, 
hypocritical Tartufe; turning all that noble Struggle for 
constitutional Liberty into a sorry farce played for his own 
benefit : this and worse is the character they give of Crom- 
well. And then there come contrasts with Washington and 
others; above all, with these noble Pyms and Hampdens, 
whose noble work he stole for himself, and ruined into a 
futility and deformity. 

This view of Cromwell seems to me the not unnatural 



THE HERO AS KING 201 

product of a century like the Eighteenth. As we said of the 
Valet; so of the Sceptic : He does not know a Hero when he 
sees him ! The Valet expected purple mantles, gilt sceptres, 
body-guards and flourishes of trumpets : the Sceptic of the 
Eighteenth century looks for regulated respectable For- 
mulas, 'Principles, ' or what else he may call them; a style 
of speech and conduct which has got to seem ' respectable, ' 
which can plead for itself in a handsome articulate manner, 
and gain the suffrages of an enlightened sceptical Eighteenth 
century ! It is, at bottom, the same thing that both the 
Valet and he expect: the garnitures of some acknowledged 
royalty, which then they will acknowledge ! The King com- 
ing to them in the rugged ^informulistic state shall be no 
King. 

For my own share, far be it from me to say or insinuate a 
word of disparagement against such characters as Hampden, 
Eliot, Pym; whom I believe to have been right worthy and 
useful men. I have read diligently what books and docu- 
ments about them I could come at; — with the honestest wish 
to admire, to love and worship them like Heroes ; but I am 
sorry to say, if the real truth must be told, with very in- 
different success ! At bottom, I found that it would not do. 
They are very noble men, these ; step along in their stately 
way, with their measured euphemisms, philosophies, par- 
liamentary eloquences. Ship-moneys, Monarchies of Man; a 
most constitutional, unblamable, dignified set of men. But 
the heart remains cold before them; the fancy alone en- 
deavours to get-up some worship of them. What man's 
heart does, in reality, break-forth into any fire of brotherly 
love for these men? They are become dreadfully dull men ! 
One breaks-down often enough in the constitutional elo- 
quence of the admirable Pym, with his 'seventhly and 
lastly. ' You find that it may be the admirablest thing in the 
world, but that it is heavy, — heavy as lead, barren as brick- 
clay; that, in a word, for you there is little or nothing now 
surviving there ! One leaves all these Nobilities standing in 
their niches of honour: the rugged outcast Cromwell, he is 
the man of them all in whom one still finds human stuff. 



202 LECTURES ON HEROES 

The great savage Baresark: he could write no euphemistic 
Monarchy of Man;, did not speak, did not work with ghb 
regularity; had no straight story to tell for himself any- 
where. But he stood bare, not cased in euphemistic coat- 
of-mail ; he grappled like a giant, face to face, heart to heart, 
with the naked truth of things ! That, after all, is the sort 
of man for one. I plead guilty to valuing such a man be- 
yond all other sorts of men. Smooth-shaven Respecta- 
bilities not a few one finds, that are not good for much. 
Small thanks to a man for keeping his hands clean, who 
would not touch the work but with gloves on ! 

Neither, on the whole, does this constitutional tolerance 
of the Eighteenth century for the other happier Puritans 
seem to be a very great matter. One might say, it is but a 
piece of Formulism and Scepticism, like the rest. They tell 
us. It was a sorrowful thing to consider that the foundation 
of our English Liberties should have been laid by 'Super- 
stition. ' These Puritans came forward with Calvinistic 
incredible Creeds, Anti-Laudisms, Westminster Confessions; 
demanding, chiefly of all, that they should have liberty to 
worship in their own way. Liberty to tax themselves : that 
was the thing they should have demanded ! It was Super- 
stition, Fanaticism, disgraceful ignorance of Constitutional 
Philosophy to insist on the other thing! — Liberty to tax 
oneself? Not to pay-out money from your pocket except 
on reason shown? No century, I think, but a rather barren 
one would have fixed on that as the first right of man! I 
should say, on the contrary, A just man will generally have 
better cause than money in what shape soever, before decid- 
ing to revolt against his Government. Ours is a most con- 
fused world; in which a good man will be thankful to see 
any kind of Government maintain itself in a not insupport- 
able manner: and here in England, to this hour, if he is not 
ready to pay a great many taxes which he can see very small 
reason in, it will not go well with him, I think! He must 
try some other climate than this. Taxgatherer? Money? 
He will say : " Take my money, since you tan, and it is so 
desirable to you ; take it, — and take yourself away with it ; 



THE HERO AS KING 203 

and leave me alone to my work here. / am still here; can 
still work, after all the money you have taken from me!" 
But if they come to him, and say, "Acknowledge a Lie; 
pretend to say you are worshipping God, when you are not 
doing it: believe not the thing that you find true, but the 
thing that I find, or pretend to find true ! " He will answer : 
"No; by God's help, no! You may take my purse; but I 
cannot have my moral Self annihilated. The purse is any 
Highwayman's who might meet me with a loaded pistol: 
but the Self is mine and God my Maker's; it is not yours; 
and I will resist you to the death, and revolt against you, 
and, on the whole, front all manner of extremities, accusa- 
tions and confusions, in defence of that!" — 

Really, it seems to me the one reason which could justify 
revolting, this of the Puritans. It has been the soul of all 
just revolts among men. Not Hunger alone produced even 
the French Revolution ; no, but the feeling of the insupport- 
able all-pervading Falsehood which had now embodied it- 
self in Hunger, in universal material Scarcity and Nonentity, 
and thereby become indisputably false in the eyes of all ! 
We will leave the Eighteenth century with its 'liberty to 
tax itself. ' We will not astonish ourselves that the mean- 
ing of such men as the Puritans remained dim to it. To 
men who believe in no reality at all, how shall a real human 
soul, the intensest of all realities, as it Vere the Voice of this 
world's Maker still speaking to us, — be intelligble? What 
it cannot reduce into constitutional doctrines relative to 
' taxing, ' or other the like material interest, gross, palpable 
to the sense, such a century will needs reject as an amor- 
phous heap of rubbish. Hampdens, Pyms and Ship-money 
will be the theme of such constitutional eloquence, striving 
to be fervid; — which will glitter, if not as fire does, then as 
ice does : and the irreducible Cromwell will remain a chaotic 
mass of ' madness, ' ' hypocrisy, ' and much else. 

From of old, I will confess, this theory of Cromwell's 
falsity has been incredible to me. Nay I cannot believe 
the like of any Great Man whatever. Multitudes of Great 



204 LECTURES ON HEROES 

Men figure in History as false selfish men ; but if we will con- 
sider it, they are but figures for us, unintelligible shadows; 
we do not see into them as men that could have existed at 
all. A superficial unbelieving generation only, with no eye 
but for the surfaces and semblances of things, could form 
such notions of Great Men. Can a great soul be possible 
without a conscience in it, the essence of all real souls, great 
or small? — No, we cannot figure Cromwell as a Falsity and 
Fatuity; the longer I study him and his career, I believe 
this the less. Why should we? There is no evidence of it. 
Is it not strange that, after all the mountains of calumny 
this man has been subject to, after being represented as the 
very prince of liars, who never, or hardly ever, spoke truth, 
but always some cunning counterfeit of truth, there should 
not yet have been one falsehood brought clearly home to 
him? A prince of liars, and no lie spoken by him. Not 
one that I could yet get sight of. It is like Pococke asking 
Grotius, Where is your proof of Mahomet's pigeon? No 
proof! — Let us leave all these calumnious chimeras, as 
chimeras ought to be left. They are not portraits of the 
man; they are distracted phantasms of him, the joint prod- 
uct of hatred and darkness. 

Looking at the man's life with our own eyes, it seems to 
me, a very different hypothesis suggests itself. What little 
we know of his earlier obscure years, distorted as it has come 
down to us, does it not all betoken an earnest, affectionate, 
sincere kind of man? His nervous melancholic tempera- 
ment indicates rather a seriousness too deep for him. Of 
those stories of 'Spectres;' of the white Spectre in broad 
daylight, predicting that he should be King of England, we 
are not bound to believe much; — probably no more than of 
the other black Spectre, or Devil in person, to whom the 
Officer saw him sell himself before Worcester Fight! But 
the mournful, over-sensitive, hypochondriac humour of 
Oliver, in his young years, is otherwise indisputably known. 
The Huntingdon Physician told Sir Philip Warwick himself. 
He has often been sent for at midnight; Mr. Cromwell was 
full of hypochondria, thought himself near dying, and " had 



THE HERO AS KING 205 

fancies about the Town-cross." These things are signifi- 
cant. Such an excitable deep-feeUng nature, in that rugged 
stubborn strength of his, is not the symptom of falsehood; 
it is the symptom and promise of quite other than falsehood ! 

The young Oliver is sent to study Law; falls, or is said 
to have fallen, for a little period, into some of the dissipa- 
tions of youth; but if so, speedily repents, abandons all this: 
not much above twenty, he is married, settled as an alto- 
gether grave and quiet man. ' He pays-back what money 
he had won at gambling, ' says the story ; — he does not think 
any gain of that kind could be really his. It is very inter- 
esting, very natural, this ' conversion,' as they well name it; 
this awakening of a great true soul from the worldly slough, 
to see into the awful truth of things ; — to see that Time and 
its shows all rested on Eternity, and this poor Earth of ours 
was the threshold either of Heaven or of Hell ! Oliver's life 
at St. Ives and Ely, as a sober industrious Farmer, is it not 
altogether as that of a true and devout man? He has re- 
nounced the world and its ways; its prizes are not the thing 
that can enrich him. He tills the earth ; he reads his Bible; 
daily assembles his servants round him to worship God. 
He comforts persecuted ministers, is fond of preachers ; nay 
can himself preach, — exhorts his neighbors to be wise, to 
redeem the time. In all this what ' hypocrisy,' ' ambition/ 
'cant,' or other falsity? The man's hopes, I do believe, 
were fixed on the other Higher World; his aim to get well 
thither, by walking well through his humble course in this 
world. He courts no notice : what could notice here do for 
him? ' Ever in his great Taskmaster's eye. ' 

It is striking, too, how he comes-out once into public 
view; he, since no other is willing to come: in resistance to 
a public grievance. I mean, in that matter of the Bedford 
Fens. No one else will go to law with Authority; therefore 
he will. That matter once settled, he returns back into 
obscurity, to his Bible and his Plough. 'Gain influence'? 
His influence is the most legitimate; derived from personal 
knowledge of him, as a just, religious, reasonable and deter- 
mined man. In this way he has lived till past forty; old 



206 LECTURES ON HEROES 

age is now in view of him, and the earnest portal of Death 
and Eternity ; it was at this point that he suddenly became 
' ambitious ' ! I do not interpret his Parliamentary mission 
in that way ! 

His successes in Parliament, his successes through the 
war, are honest successes of a brave man; who has more 
resolution in the heart of him, more light in the head of him 
than other men. His prayers to God; his spoken thanks 
to the God of Victory, who had preserved him safe, and 
carried him forward so far, through the furious clash of a 
world all set in conflict, through desperate-looking envelop- 
ments at Dunbar; through the death-hail of so many bat- 
tles; mercy after mercy; to the 'crowning mercy' of Worces- 
ter Fight: all this is good and genuine for a deep-hearted 
Calvinistic Cromwell. Only to vain unbelieving Cavaliers, 
worshipping not God but their own 'lovelocks,' frivolities 
and formalities, living quite apart from contemplations of 
God, living without God in the world, need it seem hypo- 
critical. 

Nor will his participation in the King's death involve him 
in' condemnation with us. It is a stern business killing of a 
King! But if you once go to war with him, it lies there; 
this and all else lies there. Once at war, you have made 
wager of battle with him : it is he to die, or else you. Recon- 
ciliation is problematic ; may be possible, or, far more likely, 
is impossible. It is now pretty generally admitted that 
the Parliament, having vanquished Charles First, had no 
way of making any tenable arrangement with him. The 
large Presbyterian party, apprehensive now of the Inde- 
pendents, were most anxious to do so; anxious indeed as 
for their own existence ; but it could not be. The unhappy 
Charles, in those final Hampton-Court negotiations, shows 
himself as a man fatally incapable of being dealt with. A 
man who, once for all, could not and would not understand: 
— whose thought did not in any measure represent to him 
the real fact of the matter; nay worse, whose word did not 
at all represent his thought. We may say this of him with- 
out cruelty, with deep pity rather: but it is true and un- 



THE HERO AS KING 207 

deniable. Forsaken there of all but the name of Kingship, 
he still, finding himself treated with outward respect as a 
King, fancied that he might play-off party against party, 
and smuggle himself into his old power by deceiving both. 
Alas, they both discovered that he was deceiving them. A 
man whose word will not inform you at all what he means 
or will do, is not a man you can bargain with. You must 
get out of that man's way, or put him out of yours ! The 
Presbyterians, in their despair, were still for believing 
Charles, though found false, unbelievable again and again. 
Not so Cromwell : " For all our fighting, " says he, " we are 
to have a little bit of paper?" No! — 

In fact, everywhere we have to note the decisive prac- 
tical eye of this man; how he drives towards the practical 
and practicable; has a genuine insight into what is fact. 
Such an intellect, I maintain, does not belong to a false man : 
the false man sees false shows, plausibilities, expediences: 
the true man is needed to discern even practical truth. 
Cromwell's advice about the Parliament's Army, early in 
the contest, How they were to dismiss their city-tapsters, 
flimsy riotous persons, and choose substantial yeomen, 
whose heart was in the work, to be soldiers for them : this 
is advice by a man who saw. Fact answers, if you see into 
Fact! Cromwell's Ironsides were the embodiment of this 
insight of his; men fearing God; and without any other 
fear. No more conclusively genuine set of fighters ever 
trod the soil of England, or of any other land. 

Neither will we blame greatly that word of Cromwell's to 
them; which was so blamed: ''If the King should meet me 
in battle, I would kill the King. " Why not? These words 
were spoken to men who stood as before a Higher than 
Kings. They had set more than their own lives on the cast. 
The Parliament may call it, in official language, a fighting 
^for the King;' but we, for our share, cannot understand 
that. To us it is no dilettante work, no sleek officiahty; it 
is sheer rough death and earnest. They have brought it 
to the calling-forth of War; horrid internecine fight, man 
grappling with man in fire-eyed rage, — the infernal element 



208 LECTURES ON HEROES 

in man called forth, to try it by that! Do that therefore; 
since that is the thing to be done. — The successes of Crom- 
well seem to me a very natural thing! Since he was not 
shot in battle, they were an inevitable thing. That such a 
man, with the eye to see, with the heart to dare, should 
advance, from post to post, from victory to victory, till the 
Huntingdon Farmer became, by whatever name you might 
call him, the acknowledged Strongest Man in England, 
virtually the King of England, requires no magic to explain 
it!— 

Truly it is a sad thing for a people, as for a man, to fall 
into Scepticism, into dilettantism, insincerity; not to know 
a Sincerity when they see it. For this world, and for all 
worlds, what curse is so fatal? The heart lying dead, the 
eye cannot see. What intellect remains is merely the vul- 
pine intellect. That a true King be sent them is of small 
use; they do not know him when sent. They say scorn- 
fully. Is this your King? The Hero wastes his Heroic fac- 
ulty in bootless contradiction from the unworthy; and can 
accompUsh little. For himself he does accomplish a heroic 
life, which is much, which is all" but for the world he 
accomplishes comparatively nothing. The wild rude Sin- 
cerity, direct from Nature, is not glib in answering from 
the witness-box: in your small-debt pie-powder court, he 
is scouted as a counterfeit. The vulpine intellect ' detects ' 
him. For being a man worth any thousand men, the re- 
sponse your Knox, your Cromwell gets, is an argument 
for two centuries whether he was a man at all. God's great- 
est gift to this Earth is sneeringly flung away. The mirac- 
ulous talisman is a paltry plated coin, not fit to pass in the 
shops as a common guinea. 

Lamentable this! I say, this must be remedied. Till 
this be remedied in some measure, there is nothing remedied. 
'Detect quacks'? Yes do, for Heaven's sake; but know 
withal the men that are to be trusted ! Till we know that, 
what is all our knowledge; how shall we even so much as 
detect '? For the vulpine sharpness, which considers itself 
to be knowledge, and ' detects ' in that fashion, is far mis- 



THE HERO AS KING 209 

taken. Dupes indeed are many : but, of all dupes, there is 
none so fatally situated as he who lives in undue terror of 
being duped. The world does exist; the. world has truth 
in it, or it would not exist! First recognise what is true, 
we shall then discern what is false; and properly never till 
then. 

'Know the men that are to be trusted: ' alas, this is yet, 
in these days, very far from us. The sincere alone can 
recognise sincerity. Not a Hero only is needed, but a world 
fit for him; a world not of Valets; — ^the Hero comes almost 
in vain to it otherwise ! Yes, it is far from us : but it must 
come; thank God, it is visibly coming. Till it do come, 
what have we? Ballot-boxes, suffrages, French Revolu- 
tions : — ^if we are as Valets, and do not know the Hero when 
we see him, what good are all these? A heroic Cromwell 
comes; and for a hundred-and-fifty years he cannot have 
a vote from us. Why, the insincere, unbelieving world is 
the natural property of the Quack, and of the Father of 
quacks and quackeries! Misery, confusion, un veracity are 
alone possible there. By ballot-boxes we alter the figure of 
our Quack; but the substance of him continues. The 
Valet- World has to be governed by the Sham-Hero, by the 
King merely dressed in King-gear. It is his; he is its! In 
brief, one of two things: We shall either learn to know a 
Hero, a true Governor and Captain, somewhat better, when 
we see him; or else go on to be forever governed by the 
Unheroic ;— had we ballot-boxes clattering at every street- 
corner, there were no remedy in these. 

Poor Cromwell, — great Cromwell! The inarticulate 
Prophet; Prophet who could not speak. Rude, confused, 
struggling to utter himself, with his savage depth, with his 
wild sincerity; and he looked so strange, among the elegant 
Euphemisms, dainty little Falklands, didactic Chillings- 
worths, diplomatic Clarendons! Consider him. An outer 
hull of chaotic confusion, visions of the Devil, nervous 
dreams, almost semi-madness; and yet such a clear deter- 
minate man's-energy working in the heart of that. A kind 
of chaotic man. The ray as of pure starlight and fire, work- 
14 



210 LECTURES ON HEROES 

ing in such an element of boundless hypochondria, unformed 
black of darkness! And yet withal this hypochondria, 
what was it but the very greatness of the man? The depth 
and tenderness of his wild affections: the quantity of sym- 
pathy he had with things, — the quantity of insight he would 
yet get into the heart of things, the mastery he would yet 
get over things: this was his hypochondria. The man's 
misery, as man's misery always does, came of his greatness. 
Samuel Johnson too is that kind of man. Sorrow-stricken, 
half-distracted ; the wide element of mournful black envelop- 
ing him, — wide as the world. It is the character of a pro- 
phetic man; a man with his whole soul seeing, and strug- 
gling to see. 

On this ground, too, I explain to myself Cromwell's re- 
puted confusion of speech. To himself the internal meaning 
was sun-clear; but the material with which he was to clothe 
it in utterance was not there. He had lived silent; a great 
unnamed Sea of Thought round him all his days ; and in his 
way of life little call to attempt naming or uttering that. 
With his sharp power of vision, resolute power of action, I 
doubt not he could have learned to write Books withal, and 
speak fluently enough; — he did harder things than writing 
of Books. This kind of man is precisely he who is fit for 
doing manfully all things you will set him on doing. In- 
tellect is not speaking and logicising; it is seeing and ascer- 
taining. Virtue, Vir-tus, manhood, herohood, is not fair- 
spoken immaculate regularity; it is first of all, what the Ger- 
mans well name it, Tugend (Taugend, dow-ing or Dough- 
tiness), Courage and the Faculty to do. This basis of the 
matter Cromwell had in him. 

One understands moreover how, though he could not 
speak in Parliament, he might 'preach, rhapsodic preaching; 
above all, how he might be great in extempore prayer. 
These are the free outpouring utterances of what is in the 
heart: method is not required in them; warmth, depth, 
sincerity are all that is required. Cromwell's habit of prayer 
is a notable feature of him. All his great enterprises were 
commenced with prayer. In dark inextricable-looking diffi- 



THE HERO AS KING 211 

culties, his Officers and he used to assemble, and pray alter- 
nately, for hours, for days, till some definite resolution rose 
among them, some ' door of hope, ' as they would name it, 
disclosed itself. Consider that. In tears, in fervent prayers, 
and cries to the great God, to have pity on them, to make 
His light shine before them. They, armed Soldiers of Christ, 
as they felt themselves to be; a little band of Christian 
Brothers who had drawn the sword against a great black 
devouring world not Christian, but Mammonish, Devilish, — 
they cried to God in their straits, in their extreme need, not 
to forsake the Cause that was His. The light which now 
rose upon them, — how could a human soul, by any means at 
all, get better light? Was not the purpose so formed like 
to be precisely the best, wisest, the one to be followed with- 
out hesitation any more? To them it was as the shining of 
Heaven's own Splendour in the waste-howling darkness; 
the Pillar of Fire by night, that was to guide them on their 
desolate perilous way. TFasitnotsuch? Can a man's soul, 
to this hour, get guidance by any other method than intrin- 
sically by that same, — devout prostration of the earnest 
struggling soul before the Highest, the Giver of all Light; 
be such prayer a spoken, articulate, or be it a voiceless, in- 
articulate one? There is no other method. 'Hypocrisy'? 
One begins to be weary of all that. They who call it so, 
have no right to speak on such matters. They never formed 
a purpose, what one can call a purpose. They went about 
balancing expediencies, plausibilities; gathering votes, ad- 
vices; they never were alone with the truth of a thing at 
all. — Cromwell's prayers were likely to be 'eloquent,' and 
much more than that. His was the heart of a man who 
could pray. 

But indeed his actual Speeches, I apprehend, were not 
nearly so ineloquent, incondite, as they look. We find he 
was, what all speakers aim to be, an impressive speaker, 
even in Parliament; one who, from the first, had weight. 
With that rude passionate voice of his, he was always under- 
stood to mean something, and men wished to know what. 
He disregarded eloquence, nay despised and disliked it; 



212 LECTURES ON HEROES 

spoke always without premeditation of the words he was 
to use. The Reporters, too, in those days seem to have been 
singularly candid; and to have given the Printer precisely 
what they found on their own notepaper. And withal, what 
a strange proof it is of Cromwell's being the premeditative 
ever-calculating hypocrite, acting a play before the world. 
That to the last he took no more charge of his Speeches! 
How came he not to study his words a little before flinging 
them out to the public? If the words were true words, 
they could be left to shift for themselves. 

But with regard to Cromwell's ' lying, ' we will make one 
remark. This, I suppose, or something like this, to have 
been the nature of it. All parties found themselves de- 
ceived in him; each party understood him to be meaning 
this, heard him even say so, and behold he turns-out to have 
been meaning that! He was, cry they, the chief of liars. 
But now, intrinsically, is not all this the inevitable fortune, 
not of a false man in such times, but simply of a superior 
man? Such a man must have reticences in him. If he walk 
wearing his heart upon his sleeve for daws to peck at, his 
journey will not extend far ! There is no use for any man's 
taking-up his abode in a house built of glass. A man always 
is to be himself the judge how much of his mind he will 
show to other men; even to those he would have work along 
with him. There are impertinent inquiries made : your rule 
is, to leave the inquirer i^mnformed on that matter; not, 
if you can help it, misinformed, but precisely as dark as he 
was! This, could one hit the right phrase of response, is 
what the wise and faithful man would aim to answer in such 
a case. 

Cromwell, no doubt of it, often spoke in the dialect of 
small subaltern parties; uttered to them a part of his mind. 
Each little party thought him all its own. Hence their rage, 
one and all, to find him not of their party, but of his own 
party! Was it his blame? At all seasons of his history he 
must have felt, among such people, how, if he explained to 
them the deeper insight he had, they must either have shud- 
dered aghast at it, or believing it, their own little compact 



THE HERO AS KING 213 

hypothesis must have gone wholly to wreck. They could 
not have worked in his province any niore; nay perhaps 
they could not now have worked in their own province. It 
is the inevitable position of a great man among small men. 
Small men, most active, useful, are to be seen everywhere, 
whose whole activity depends on some conviction which to 
you is palpably a limited one; imperfect, what we call an 
error. But would it be a kindness always, is it a duty 
always or often, to disturb them in that? Many a man, 
doing loud work in the world, stands only on some thin tra- 
ditionality, conventionality; to him indubitable, to you 
incredible: break that beneath him, he sinks to endless 
depths ! " I might have my hand full of truth, " said Fon- 
tenelle, " and open only my little finger. " 

And if this be the fact even in matters of doctrine, how 
much more in all departments of practice ! He that cannot 
withal keep his mind to himself cannot practise any consid- 
erable thing whatever. And we call it ' dissimulation, * all 
this? What would you think of calling the general of an 
army a dissembler because he did not tell every corporal 
and private soldier, who pleased to put the question, what 
his thoughts were about everything? — Cromwell, I should 
rather say, managed all this in a manner we must admire 
for its perfection. An endless vortex of such questioning 
' corporals ' rolled confusedly round him through his whole 
course; whom he did answer. It must have been as a great 
true-seeing man that he managed this too. Not one proved 
falsehood, as I said; not one! Of what man that ever 
wound himself through such a coil of things will you say so 
much? — 

But in fact there are two errors, widely prevalent, which 
pervert to the very basis our judgments formed about such 
men as Cromwell; about their 'ambition,' 'falsity,' and 
suchlike. The first is what I might call substituting the 
goal of their career for the course and starting-point of it. 
The vulgar Historian of a Cromwell fancies that he had de- 
termined on being Protector of England, at the time when 



214 LECTURES ON HEROES 

he was ploughing the marsh lands of Cambridgeshire. His 
career lay all mapp'ed-out: a program of the whole drama; 
which he then step by step dramatically unfolded, with all 
manner of cunning, deceptive dramaturgy, as he went on, — 
the hollow, scheming 'TnoKpirTjg^. or Play-actor, that he 
was ! This is a radical perversion; all but universal in such 
cases. And think for an instant how different the fact is! 
How much does one of us foresee of his own life? Short 
way ahead of us it is all dim; an i^nwound skein of possi- 
bilities, of apprehensions, attemptabilities, vague-looming 
hopes. This Cromwell had not his life lying all in that 
fashion of Program, which he needed then, with that un- 
fathomable cunning of his, only to enact dramatically, scene 
after scene ! Not so. We see it so ; but to him it was in no 
measure so. What absurdities would fall-away of* them- 
selves, were this one undeniable fact kept honestly in view 
by History! Historians indeed will tell you that they do 
keep it in view; — but look whether such is practically the 
fact! Vulgar History,* as in this Cromwell's case, omits it 
altogether; even the best kinds of History only remember 
it now and then. To remember it duly with vigorous per- 
fection, as in the fact it stood, requires indeed a rare faculty ; 
rare, nay impossible. A very Shakspeare for faculty; or 
more than Shakspeare; who could enact sl brother man's 
biography, see with the brother man's eyes at all points of 
his course what things he saw ; in short, know his course and 
him, as few ' Historians ' are like to do. Half or more of all 
the thick-plied perversions which distort our image of Crom- 
well, will disappear, if we honestly so much as try to repre- 
sent them so; in sequence, as they were; not in the lump, 
as they are thrown-down before us. 

But a second error, which I think the generality commit, 
refers to this same 'ambition' itself. We exaggerate the 
ambition of Great Men; we mistake what the nature of it 
is. Great Men are not ambitious in that sense; he is a small 
poor man that is ambitious so. Examine the man who lives 
in misery because he does not shine above other men; who 
goes about producing himself, pruriently anxious about his 



i 



THE HERO AS KING 215 

gifts and claims; struggling to force everybody, as it were 
begging everybody for God's sake, to acknowledge him a 
great man, and set him over the heads of men! Such a 
creature is among the wretchedest sights seen under this 
sun. A great man? A poor morbid prurient empty man; 
fitter for the ward of a hospital, than for a throne among 
men. I advise you to keep-out of his way. He cannot walk 
on quiet paths; unless you will look at him, wonder at him, 
write paragraphs about him, he cannot live. It is the empti- 
ness of the man, not his greatness. Because there is noth- 
ing in himself, he hungers and thirsts that you would find 
something in him. In good truth, I believe no great man, 
not so much as a genuine man who had health and real sub- 
stance in him of whatever magnitude, was ever much tor- 
mented'in this way. 

Your Cromwell, what good could it do him to be ' noticed' 
by noisy crowds of people? God his Maker already noticed 
him. He, Cromwell, was already there; no notice would 
make him other than he already was. Till his hair was 
grown gray; and Life from the downhill slope was all seen 
to be limited, not infinite but finite, and all a measurable 
matter how it went, — he had been content to plough the 
ground, and read his Bible. He in his old days could not 
support it any longer, without selling himself to Falsehood, 
that he might ride in gilt carriages to Whitehall, and have 
clerks with bundles of papers haunting him, " Decide this, 
decide that, " which in utmost sorrow of heart no man can 
perfectly decide ! What could gilt carriages do for this man? 
From of old, was there not in his life a weight of meaning, 
a terror and a splendour^ as of Heaven itself? His existence 
there as man set him beyond the need of gilding. Death, 
Judgment and Eternity: these already lay as the back- 
ground of whatsoever he thought or did. All his life lay 
begirt as in a sea of nameless Thoughts, which no speech 
of a mortal could name. God's Word, as the Puritan pro- 
phets of that time had read it: this was great, and all else 
was little to him. To call such a man ' ambitious, ' to figure 
him as the prurient windbag described above, seems to me 



216 LECTURES ON HEROES ■ 

the poorest solecism. Such a man will say: "Keep your 
gilt carriages and huzzaing mobs, keep your red-tape clerks, 
your influentialities, your important businesses. Leave me 
alone, leave me alone; there is too much of life in me al- 
ready ! " Old Samuel Johnson, the greatest soul in England 
in his day, was not ambitious. ' Corsica Boswell ' flaunted 
at public shows with printed ribbons round his hat; but 
the great old Samuel stayed at home. The world-wide soul 
wrapt-up in its thoughts, in its sorrows; — what could parad- 
•ings, and ribbons in the hat, do for it? 

Ah yes, I will say again : The great silent men ! Looking 
round on the noisy inanity of the world, words with little 
meaning, actions with little worth, one loves to reflect on 
the great Empire of Silence. The noble silent men, scat- 
tered here and there, each in his department ; silently think- 
ing, silently working; whom no Morning Newspaper makes 
mention of! They are the salt of the Earth. A country 
that has none or few of these is in a bad way. Like a forest 
which had no roots; which had all turned into leaves and 
boughs; — which must soon wither and be no forest. Woe 
for us if we had nothing but what we can show, or speak. 
Silence, the great Empire of Silence : higher than the stars ; 
deeper than the Kingdoms of Death ! It alone is great; all 
else is small. — I hope we English will long maintain our 
grand talent pour le silence. Let others that cannot do with- 
out standing on barrel-heads, to spout, and be seen of 
all the market-place, cultivate speech exclusively, — be- 
come a most green forest without roots! Solomon says, 
There is a time to speak ; but also a time to keep silence. Of 
some great silent Samuel, not urged to writing, as old Samuel 
Johnson says he was, by want of money, and nothing other, 
one might ask, " Why do not you too get up and speak ; pro- 
mulgate your system, found your sect? " " Truly, " he will 
answer, " I am continent of my thought hitherto; happily I 
have yet had the ability to keep it in me, no compulsion 
strong enough to speak it. My ' system ' is not for promul- 
gation first of all; it is for serving myself to live by. That 
is the great purpose of it to me And then the 'honour'? 



THE HERO AS KING 217 

Alas, yes; — but as Cato said of the statue: So many statues 
in that Forum of yours, may it not be better if they ask, 
Where is Cato's statue? " 

But now, by way of counterpoise to this of Silence, let me 
say that there are two kinds of ambition; one wholly blam- 
able, the other laudable and inevitable. Nature has pro- 
vided that the great silent Samuel shall not be silent too 
long. The selfish wish to shine over others, let it be ac- 
counted altogether poor and miserable. ' Seekest thou great 
things, seek them not:^ this is most true. And yet, I say, 
there is an irrepressible tendency in every man to develop 
himself according to the magnitude which Nature has made 
him of; to speak-out, to act-out, what Nature has laid in 
him. This is proper, fit, inevitable; nay it is a duty, and 
even the summary of duties for a man. The meaning of 
life here on earth might be defined as consisting in this : To 
unfold your self, to work what thing you have the faculty 
for. It is a necessity for the human being, the first law of 
our existence. Coleridge beautifully remarks that the in- 
fant learns to speak by this necessity it feels. — We will say 
therefore: To decide about ambition, whether it is bad or 
not, you have two things to take into view. Not the covet- 
ing of the place alone, but the fitness of the man for the place 
withal: that is the question. Perhaps the place was his; 
perhaps he had a natural right, and even obligation, to seek 
the place ! Mirabeau's ambition to be Prime Minister, how 
shall we blame it, if he were ' the only man in France that 
could have done any good there'? Hopefuler perhaps had 
he not so clearly felt how much good he could do ! . But a 
poor Necker, who could do no good, and had even felt that 
he could do none, yet sitting broken-hearted because they 
had flung him out, and he was now quit of it, well might 
Gibbon mourn over him. — Nature, I say, has provided 
amply that the silent great men shall strive to speak withal; 
too amply, rather! 

Fancy, for example, you had revealed to the brave old 
Samuel Johnson, in his shrouded-up existence, that it was 
possible for him to do priceless divine work for his country 



218 LECTURES ON HEROES 

and the whole world. That the perfect Heavenly Law 
might be made Law on this Earth; that the prayer he 
prayed daily, 'Thy kingdom come/ was at length to be 
fulfilled! If you had convinced his judgment of this; that 
it was possible, practicable; that he the mournful silent 
Samuel was called to take a part in it ! Would not the whole 
soul of the man have flamed-up into a divine clearness, into 
noble utterance and determination to act; casting all sor- 
rows and misgivings under his feet, counting all affliction 
and contradiction small, — the whole dark element of his 
existence blazing into articulate radiance of light and light- 
ning? It were a true ambition this! And think now how 
it actually was with Cromwell. From of old, the sufferings 
of God's Church, true zealous Preachers of the truth flung 
into dungeons, whipt, set on pillories, their ears cropt-off, 
God's Gospel-cause trodden under foot of the unworthy : all 
this had lain heavy on his soul. Long years he had looked 
upon it, in silence, in prayer; seeing no remedy on Earth; 
trusting well that a remedy in Heaven's goodness would 
come, — that such a course was false, unjust, and could not 
last forever. And now behold the dawn of it; after twelve 
years silent waiting, all* England stirs itself; there is to be 
once more a Parliament, the Right will get a voice for itself: 
inexpressible well-grounded hope has come again into the 
Earth. Was not such a Parliament worth being a member 
of? Cromwell threw down his ploughs, and hastened thither. 
He spoke there, — rugged bursts of earnestness, of a self- 
seen truth, where we get a ghmpse of them. He worked 
there; he fought and strove, like a strong true giant of 
a man, through cannon-tumult and all else, — on and on, 
till the Cause triumphed, its once so formidable enemies all 
swept from before it, and the dawn of hope had become clear 
light of victory and certainty. That he stood there as the 
strongest soul of England, the undisputed Hero of all Eng- 
land, — what of this? It is possible that the Law of Christ's 
Gospel could now establish itself in the world ! The Theoc- 
racy which John Knox in his pulpit might dream of as a 
'devout imagination/ this practical man, experienced in 



THE HERO AS KING 219 

the whole chaos of most rough practice, dared to consider 
as capable of being realised. Those that were highest in 
Christ's Church, the devoutest wisest men, were to rule the 
land : in some considerable degree, it might be so and should 
be so. Was it not ir2^e, God's truth? And if ^ri^e, was it not 
then the very thing to do? The strongest practical intellect 
in England dared to answer, Yes ! This I call a noble true 
purpose ; is it not, in its own dialect, the noblest that could 
enter into the heart of Statesman or man? For a Knox to 
take it up was something; but for a Cromwell, with his 
great sound sense and experience of what our world was, — 
History, I think, shows it only this once in such a degree. 
I account it the culminating point of Protestantism; the 
most heroic phasis that ' Faith in the Bible ' was appointed 
to exhibit here below. Fancy it: that it were made mani- 
fest to one of us, how we could make the Right supremely 
victorious over Wrong, and all that we had longed and 
prayed for, as the highest good to England and all lands, an 
attainable fact ! 

Well, I must say, the vulpine intellect, with its knowing- 
ness, its alertness and expertness in ' detecting hypocrites, ' 
seems to me a rather sorry business. We have had but one 
such Statesman in England; one man, that I can get sight 
of, who ever had in the heart of him any such purpose at all. 
One man, in the course of fifteen-hundred years; and this 
was his welcome. He had adherents by the hundred or the 
ten; opponents by the million. Had England rallied all 
round him, — why, then, England might have been a Christ- 
ian land ! As it is, vulpine knowingness sits yet at its hope- 
less problem, ' Given a world of Knaves, to educe an Honesty 
from their united action;' — how cumbrous a problem, you 
may see in Chancery Law-Courts; and some other places! 
Till at lefigth, by Heaven's just anger, but also by Heaven's 
great grace, the matter begins to stagnate; and this prob- 
lem is becoming to all men a palpably hopeless one. — 

But with regard to Cromwell and his purposes : Hume, 
and a multitude following him, come upon me here with 



220 LECTURES ON HEROES 

an admission that Cromwell loas sincere at first; a sincere 
'Fanatic' at first, but gradually became a 'Hypocrite' as 
things opened round him. This of the Fanatic-Hypocrite 
is Hume's theory of it; extensively applied since, — to 
Mahomet- and many others. Think of it seriously, you will 
find something in it; not much, not all, very far from all. 
Sincere hero hearts do not sink in this miserable manner. 
The Sun flings-forth impurities, gets balefully incrusted with 
spots ; but it does not quench itself, and become no Sun at 
all, but a mass of Darkness ! I will venture to say that such 
never befell a great deep Cromwell ; I think, never. Nature's 
own lion-hearted Son; Antaeus-like, his strength is got by 
touching the Earth, his Mother; lift him up from the Earth, 
lift him up into Hypocrisy, Inanity, his strength is gone. 
We will not assert that Cromwell was an immaculate man; 
that he fell into no faults, no insincerities among the rest. 
He was no dilettante professor of 'perfections, ' 'immaculate 
conducts. ' He was a rugged Orson, rending his rough way 
through actual true work, — doubtless with many a fall there- 
in. Insincerities, faults, very many faults daily and hourly: 
it was too well known to him; known to God and him ! The 
Sun was dimmed many a time; but the Sun had not himself 
grown a Dimness. Cromwell's last words, as he lay waiting 
for death, are those of a Christian heroic man. Broken 
prayers to God, that He would judge him and this Cause, He 
since man could not, in justice yet in pity. They are most 
touching words. He breathed-out his wild great soul, its 
toils and sins all ended now, into the presence of his Maker, 
in this manner. 

I, for one, will not call the man a Hypocrite ! Hypocrite, 
mummer, the life of him a mere theatricality; empty barren 
quack, hungry for the shouts of mobs? The man had made 
obscurity do very well for him till his head was gray; and 
now he was, there as he stood recognised unblamed, the 
virtual King of England. Cannot a man do without King's 
Coaches and Cloaks? Is it such a blessedness to have clerks 
forever pestering you with bundles of papers in red tape? 
A simple Diocletian prefers planting of cabbages ; a George 



THE HERO AS KING 221 

Washington, no very immeasurable man, does the like. One 
would say, it is what any genuine man could do ; and would 
do. The instant his real work were out in the matter of 
Kingship, — away with it ! ° 

Let us remark, meanwhile, how indispensable every- 
where a King is, in all movements of men. It is strikingly 
shown, in this very War, what becomes of men when they 
cannot find a Chief Man, and their enemies can. The Scotch 
Nation was all but unanimous in Puritanism; zealous and 
of one mind about it, as in this English end of the Island 
was always far from being the case. But there was no great 
Cromwell among them; poor tremulous, hesitating, diplo- 
matic Argyles and suchlike : none of them had a heart true 
enough for the truth, or durst commit himself to the truth. 
They had no leader; and the scattered Cavalier party in 
that country had one: Montrose, the noblest of all the 
Cavaliers; an accomplished, gallant-hearted, splendid man; 
what one may call the Hero-Cavalier. Well, look at it; on 
the one hand subjects without a King; on the other a King 
without subjects ! The subjects without King can do noth- 
ing; the subjectless King can do something. This Mon- 
trose, with a handful of Irish or Highland savages, few of 
them so much as guns in their hands, dashes at the drilled 
Puritan armies Hke a wild whirlwind; sweeps them, time 
after time, some five times over, from the field before him. 
He was at one period, for a short while, master of all Scot- 
land. One man; but he was a man : a million zealous men, 
but without the one; they against him were powerless ! Per- 
haps of all the persons in that Puritan struggle, from first 
to last, the single indispensable one was verily Cromwell. 
To see and dare, and decide ; to be a fixed pillar in the welter 
of uncertainty; — a King among them, whether they called 
him so or not. 

Precisely here, however, lies the rub for Cromwell. His 
other proceedings have all found advocates, and stand gen- 
erally justified; but this dismissal of the Rump Parhament 
and assumption of the Protectorship, is what no one can par- 



222 LECTURES ON HEROES 

don him. He had fairly grown to be King in England; 
Chief Man of the victorious party in England: but it seems 
he could not do without the King's Cloak, and sold himself 
to perdition in order to get it. Let us see a little how this 
was. 

England, Scotland, Ireland, all lying now subdued at the 
feet of the Puritan Parliament, the practical question arose, 
What was to be done with it? How will you govern these 
Nations, which Providence in a wondrous way has given-up 
to your disposal? Clearly those hundred surviving mem- 
bers of the Long Parliament, who sit there as supreme au- 
thority, cannot continue forever to sit. What is to be done? 
— It was a question which theoretical constitution-builders 
may find easy to answer; but to Cromwell, looking there 
into the real practical facts of it, there could be none more 
complicated. He asked of the Parhament, What it was 
they would decide upon? It was for the Parliament to say. 
Yet the Soldiers too, however contrary to Formula, they 
who had purchased this victory with their blood, it seemed 
to them that they also should have something to say in it ! 
We will not "For all our fighting have nothing but a little 
piece of paper. " We understand that the Law of God's 
Gospel, to which He through us has given the victory, shall 
establish itself, or try to establish itself, in this land ! 

For three years, Cromwell says, this question had been 
sounded in the ears of the Parliament. They could make no 
answer; nothing but talk, talk. Perhaps it lies in the nature 
of parliamentary bodies; perhaps no Parliament could in 
such case make any answer but even that of talk, talk! 
Nevertheless the question must and shall be answered. You 
sixty men there, becoming fast odious, even despicable, to 
the whole nation, whom the nation already calls Rump Par- 
liament, you cannot continue to sit there : who or what then 
is to follow? 'Free Parliament,' right of Election, Consti- 
tutional Formulas of one sort or the other, — the thing is a 
hungry Fact coming on us, which we must answer or be 
devoured by it! And who are you that prate of Constitu- 
tional Formulas, rights of Parliament? You have had to 



THE HERO AS KING 223 

kill your King, to make Pride's Purges, to expel and banish 
by the law of the stronger whosoever would not let your 
Cause prosper: there are but fifty or three-score of you left 
there, debating in these days. Tell us what we shall do; 
not in the way of Formula, but of practicable Fact ! 

How they did finally answer, remains obscure to this day. 
The diligent Godwin himself admits that he cannot make it 
out. The Hkeliest is, that this poor Parliament still would 
not, and indeed could not dissolve and disperse; that when 
it came to the point of actually dispersing, they again, for 
the tenth or twentieth time, adjourned it, — and Cromwell's 
patience failed him. But we will take the favourablest 
hypothesis ever started for the Parliament; the favour- 
ablest, though I beheve it is not the true one, but too 
favourable. 

According to this version: At the uttermost crisis, when 
Cromwell and his Officers were met on the one hand, and the 
fifty or sixty Rump Members on the other, it was suddenly 
told Cromwell that the Rump in its despair was answering in 
a very singular way; that in their splenetic envious despair, 
to keep-out the Army at least, these men were hurrying 
through the House a kind of Reform Bill, — Parliament to be 
chosen by the whole of England ; equable electoral division 
into districts ; free suffrage, and the rest of it ! A very ques- 
tionable, or indeed for them an unquestionable thing. Re- 
form Bill, free suffrage of Enghshmen? Why, the Royalists 
themselves, silenced indeed but not exterminated, perhaps 
outnumber us; the great numerical majority of England was 
always indifferent to our Cause, merely looked at it and sub- 
mitted to it. It is in weight and force, not by counting of 
heads, that we are the majority! And now with your For- 
mulas and Reform Bills, the whole matter, sorely won by 
our swords, shall again launch itself to sea; become a mere 
hope, and Hkelihood, small even as a likelihood? And it is 
not a Hkelihood; it is a certainty, which we have won, by 
God's strength and our own right hands, and do now hold 
here. Cromwell walked down to these refractory Members; 
interrupted them in that rapid speed of their Reform Bill; — 



224 LECTURES ON HEROES 

ordered them to begone, and talk there no more. — Can we 
not forgive him? Can we not understand him? John Mil- 
ton, who looked on it all near at hand, could applaud him. 
The Reality had swept the Formulas away before it. I 
fancy, most men who were realities in England might see 
into the necessity of that. 

The strong daring man, therefore, has set all manner of 
Formulas and logical superficialities against him; has dared 
appeal to the genuine Fact of this England, Whether it will 
support him or not? It is curious to see how he struggles 
to govern in some constitutional way; find some Parliament 
to support him ; but cannot. His first Parliament, the one 
they call Barebones's Parliament, is, so to speak, a Con- 
vocation of the Notables. From all quarters of England the 
leading Ministers and chief Puritan Officials nominate the 
men most distinguished by religious reputation, influence 
and attachment to the true Cause : these are assembled to 
shape-out a plan. They sanctioned what was past; shaped 
as they could what was to come. They were scornfully 
called Barebones's Parliament: the man's name, it seems, 
was not Barebones, but Barbone, — a good enough man. Nor 
was it a jest, their work; it was a most serious reality, — a 
trial on the part of these Puritan Notables how far the Law 
of Christ could become the Law of this England. There 
were men of sense among them, men of some quality; men 
of deep piety I suppose the most of them were. They failed, 
it seems, and broke down, endeavouring to reform the Court 
of Chancery! They dissolved themselves, as incompetent; 
delivered-up their power again into the hands of the Lord 
General Cromwell, to do with it what he liked and could. 

What will he do with it? The Lord General Cromwell, 
'Commander-in-Chief of all the Forces raised and to be 
raised; ' he hereby sees himself, at this unexampled juncture, 
as it were the one available Authority left in England, noth- 
ing between England and utter Anarchy but him alone. 
Such is the undeniable Fact of his position and England's, 
there and then. What will he do with it? After delibera- 
tion, he decides that he will accept it; will formally, with 



THE HERO AS KING 225 

public solemnity, say and vow before God and men, " Yes, 
the Fact is so, and I will do the best I can with it ! " Pro • 
tectorship, Instrument of Government, — these are the exter- 
nal forms of the thing; worked out and sanctioned as they 
could in the circumstances be, by the Judges, by the leading 
Official people, 'Council of Officers and Persons of interest 
in the Nation:' and as for the thing itself, undeniably 
enough, at the pass matters had now come to, there luas no 
alternative but Anarchy or that. Puritan England might 
accept it or not; but Puritan England was, in real truth, 
saved from suicide thereby ! — I believe the Puritan People 
did, in an inarticulate, grumbling, yet on the whole grateful 
and real way, accept this anomalous act of Oliver's ; at least, 
he and they together made it good, and always better to the 
last. But in their Parliamentary articulate way, they had 
their difficulties, and never knew fully what to say to it ! — 

Oliver's second Parliament, properly his first regular 
Parliament, chosen by the rule laid-down in the Instrument 
of Government, did assemble, and worked; — but got, before 
long, into bottomless questions as to the Protector's right, 
as to 'usurpation,' and so forth; and had at the earliest 
legal day to be dismissed. Cromwell's concluding Speech 
to these men is a remarkable one. So likewise to his third 
Parliament, in similar rebuke for their pedantries and ob- 
stinancies. Most rude, chaotic, all these Speeches are; but 
most earnest-looking. You would say. it was a sincere help- 
less man; not used to speak the great inorganic thought of 
him, but to act it rather! A helplessness of utterance, in 
such bursting fulness of meaning. He talks much about 
' births of Providence: ' All these changes, so many victories 
and events, were not forethoughts, and theatrical contriv- 
ances of men, of 7ne or of men; it is blind blasphemers that 
will persist in calling them so! He insists with a heavy 
sulphurous wrathful emphasis on this. As he well might. 
As if a Cromwell in that dark huge game he had been play- 
ing, the world wholly thrown into chaos round him, had fore- 
seen it all, and played it all off like a precontrived puppets 
show by wood and wire ! These things were foreseen by no 
15 



226 LECTURES ON HEROES 

man, he says; no man could tell what a day would bring 
forth : they were ' births of Providence, ' God's finger guid- 
ed us on, and we came at last to clear height of victory, 
God's Cause triumphant in these Nations; and you as a 
Parliament could assemble together, and say in what man- 
ner all this could be organised, reduced into rational feas- 
ibility among the affairs of men. You were to help with 
your wise counsel in doing that. "You have had such 
an opportunity as no Parliament in England ever had." 
Christ's Law, the Right and True, was to be in some measure 
made the Law of this land. In place of that, you have got 
into your idle pedantries, constitution ali ties, bottomless 
cavillings and questionings about written laws for my com- 
ing here; — and would send the whole matter in Chaos again, 
because I have no Notary's parchment, but only God's 
voice from the battle-whirlwind, for being President among 
you ! That opportunity is gone ; and we know not when it 
will return. You have had your constitutional Logic ; and 
Mammon's Law, not Christ's Law, rules yet in this land. 
" God be judge between you and me ! " These are his final 
words to them: Take you your constitution-formulas in 
your hand; and I my mformal struggles, purposes, realities 
and acts; and " God be judge between you and me ! " — 

We said above what shapeless, involved chaotic things 
the printed Speeches of Cromwell are. Wilfully ambiguous, 
unintelligible, say the most: a hypocrite shrouding himself 
in confused Jesuitic jargon ! To me they do not seem so. I 
will say rather, they afforded the first glimpses I could ever 
get into the reahty of this Cromwell, nay into the possibility 
of him. Try to believe that he means something, search 
lovingly what that may be: you will find a real speech lying 
imprisoned in these broken rude tortuous utterances; a 
meaning in the great heart of this inarticulate man ! You 
will, for the first time, begin to see that he was a man ; not 
an enigmatic chimera, unintelligible to you, incredible to 
you. The Histories and Biographies written of this Crom- 
well, written in shallow sceptical generations that could not 
know or conceive of a deep believing man^ are far more 



THE HERO AS KING . 227 

obscure than Cromweirs Speeches. You look through them 
only into the infinite vague of Black and the Inane. ' Heats 
and jealousies/ says Lord Clarendon himself: 'heats and 
jealousies/ mere crabbed whims, theories and crotchets; 
these induced slow sober quiet Englishmen to lay down their 
ploughs and work; and fly into red fury of confused war 
against the best-conditioned of Kings ! Try if you can find 
that true. Scepticism writing about Belief may have great 
gifts; but it is really i^Z^ra mres there. It is Blindness lay- 
ing-down the Laws of Optics. — 

Cromwell's third Parliament split on the same rock as his 
second. Ever the constitutional Formula: How came you 
there? Show us some Notary parchment ! Blind pedants: 
— "Why, surely the same power which makes you a Par- 
liament, that, and something more, made me a Protector ! " 
If my Protectorship is nothing, what in the name of wonder 
is your Parliamenteership, a reflex and creation of that? — 

Parliaments having failed, there remained nothing but 
the way of Despotism. Military Dictators, each with his 
district, to coerce, the Royalist and other gainsay ers, to 
govern them, if not by act of Parliament, then by the sword. 
Formula shall not carry it, while the Reality is here ! I will 
go on, protecting oppressed Protestants abroad, appointing 
just judges, wise managers, at home, cherishing true Gospel 
ministers; doing the best I can to make England a Christian 
England, greater than old Rome, the Queen of Protestant 
Christianity; I, since you will not help me; I while God 
leaves me life! — Why did he not give it up; retire into 
obscurity again, since the Law would not acknowledge him? 
cry several. That is where they mistake. For him there was 
no giving of it up! Prime Ministers have governed coun- 
tries, Pitt, Pombal, Choiseul ; and their word was a law while 
it held: but this Prime Minister was one that could not get 
resigned. Let him once resign, Charles Stuart and the Cav- 
aliers waited to kill him; to kill the Cause and him. Once 
embarked, there was no retreat,, no return. This Prime 
Minister could retire no-whither except into his tomb. 

One is sorry for Cromwell in his old days. His com- 



228 LECTURES ON HEROES 

plaint is incessant of the heavy burden Providence has laid 
on him. Heavy; which he must bear till death. Old Col- 
onel Hutchinson, as his wife relates it, Hutchinson, his old 
battle-mate, coming to see him on some indispensable busi- 
ness, much against his will, — Cromwell 'follows him to the 
door, ' in a most fraternal, domestic, conciliatory style; begs 
that he would be reconciled to him, his old brother in arms ; 
says how much it grieves him to be misunderstood, deserted 
by true fellow-soldiers, dear to him from of old : the rigorous 
Hutchinson, cased in his Republican formula, sullenly goes 
his way. — And the man's head now white; his strong arm 
growing weary with its long work! I think always too of 
his poor Mother, now very old, living in that Palace of his; 
a right brave woman; ^ as indeed they lived all an honest 
God-fearing Household there : if she heard a shot go-off, she 
thought it was her son killed. He had to come to her at 
least once a day, that she might see with her own eyes that 

he was yet living. The poor old Mother ! What had this 

man gained; what had he gained? He had a hfe of sore 
strife and toil, to his last day. Fame, ambition, place in 
History? His dead body was hung in chains; his 'place in 
History, ' — place in History forsooth ! — has been a place of 
ignominy, accusation, blackness and disgrace; and here, 
this day, who knows if it is not rash in me to be among the 
first that ever ventured to pronounce him not a knave and 
liar, but a genuinely honest man! Peace to him. Did he 
not, in spite of all, accompUsh much for us? We walk 
smoothly over his great rough heroic life; step-over his body 
sunk in the ditch there. We need not spurn it, as we step 
on it! — Let the Hero rest. It was not to men^s judgment 
that he appealed : nor have men judged him very well. 

Precisely a century and a year after this of Puritanism 
had got itself hushed-up into decent composure, and its re- 
sults made smooth, in 1688, there broke-out a far deeper 
explosion, much more difficult to hush-up, known to all mor- 
tals, and like to be long known, by the name of French 
Revolution. It is properly the third and final act of Prot- 



THE HERO AS KING 229 

estantism; the explosive confused return of mankind to 
Reality and Fact, now that they were perishing of Sem- 
blance and Sham., We call our EngHsh Puritanism the 
second act: "Well then, the Bible is true; let us go by the 
Bible!" "In Church," said Luther; "In Church and 
State, " said Cromwell, "let us go by what actually is God's 
Truth. " Men have to return to reality; they cannot live 
on semblance. The French Revolution, or third act, we 
may well call the final one; for lower than that savage Sans- 
culottism men cannot go. They stand there on the nakedest 
haggard Fact, undeniable in all seasons and circumstances ; 
and may and must begin again confidently to build-up from 
that. The French explosion, like the English one, got its 
King, — who had no Notary parchment to show for himself. 
We have still to glance for a moment at Napoleon, our 
second modern King. 

Napoleon does by no means seem to me so great a man as 
Cromwell. His enormous victories which reached over all 
Europe, while Cromwell abode mainly in our little England, 
are but as the high stilts on which the man is seen standing; 
the stature of the man is not altered thereby. I find in him 
no such sincerity as in Cromwell; only a far inferior sort. 
No silent walking, through long years, with the Awful.Un- 
namable of this Universe; 'walking with God,' as he calls 
it ; and faith and strength in that alone : latent thought and 
valour, content to lie latent, then burst out as in blaze of 
Heaven's lightning! Napoleon lived in an age when God 
was no longer believed ; the meaning of all Silence, Latency, 
was thought to be Nonentity: he had to begin not out of 
the Puritan Bible, but out of poor Sceptical Encyclopedies. 
This was the length the man carried it. Meritorious to get 
so far. His compact, prompt, everyway articulate char- 
acter is in itself perhaps small, compared with our great 
chaotic marticulate Cromwell's. Instead of 'dumb Pro- 
phet strugghng to speak, ' we have a portentous mixture of 
the Quack withal! Hume's notion of the Fanatic-Hypo- 
crite, with such truth as it has, will apply much better to 
Napoleon than it did to Cromwell, to Mahomet or the hke, — 



230 LECTURES ON HEROES 

where indeed taken strictly it has hardly-any truth at all. 
An element of blamable ambition shows itself, from the first, 
in this man; gets the victory over him at last, and involves 
him and his work in ruin. 

'False as a bulletin' became a proverb in Napoleon's 
time. He makes what excuse he could for it: that it was 
necessary to mislead the enemy, to keep-up his own men's 
courage, and so forth. On the whole, there are no excuses. 
A man in no case has liberty to tell lies. It had been, in the 
long-run, better for Napoleon too if he had not told any. In 
fact, if a man have any purpose reaching beyond the hour 
and day, meant to be found extant next day, what good can 
it ever be to promulgate lies? The lies are found-out; 
ruinous penalty is exacted for them. No man will believe 
the liar next time even when he speaks truth, when it is of 
the last importance that he be believed. The old cry of wolf ! 
— A Lie is wo-thing ; you cannot of nothing make something ; 
you make nothing at last, and lose your labour into the bar- 
gain. 

Yet Napoleon had a sincerity : we are to distinguish be- 
tween what is superficial and what is fundamental in insin- 
cerity. Across these outer manoeuverings and quackeries 
of his, which were many and most blamable, let us discern 
withal that the man had a certain instinctive ineradicable 
feeling for reality ; and did base himself upon fact, so long 
as he had any basis. He has an instinct of Nature better 
than his culture was. His savans, Bourrienne tells us, in 
that voyage to Egypt were one evening busily occupied argu- 
ing that there could be no God. They had proved it, to their 
satisfaction, by all manner of logic. Napoleon looking up 
into the stars, answers, "Very ingenious. Messieurs: but 
who made all that? " The Atheistic logic runs-off from him 
like water; the great Fact stares him in the face: "Who 
made all that? " So too in Practice : he, as every man that 
can be great, or have victory in this world, sees, through all 
entanglements, the practical heart of the matter; drives 
straight towards that. When the steward of his Tuileries 
Palace was exhibiting the new upholstery, with praises, and 



THE HERO AS KING 231 

demonstration how glorious it was, and how cheap withal, 
Napoleon, making little answer, asked for a pair of scissors, 
dipt one of the gold tassles from a window-curtain, put it 
in his pocket and walked on. Some days afterwards, he pro- 
duced it at the right moment, to the horror of his upholstery 
functionary ; it was not gold but tinsel ! In Saint Helena 
it is notable how he still, to his last days, insists on the prac- 
tical, the real. "Why talk and complain; above all, why 
quarrel with one another? There is no result ii^ it; it comes 
to nothing that one can do. Say nothing, if one can do 
nothing!" He speaks often so, to his poor discontented 
followers ; he is like a piece of silent strength in the middle 
of their morbid querulousness there. 

And accordingly was there not what we can call a faith in 
him, genuine so far as it went? That this new enormous 
Democracy asserting itself here in the French Revolution is 
an insuppressible Fact, which the whole world, with its old 
forces and institutions, cannot put down; this was a true 
insight of his, and took his conscience and enthusiasm along 
with it, — a faith. And did he not interpret the dim purport 
of it well? 'La carrikre ouverte- aux talens, The implements 
to him who can handle them : ' this actually is the truth, and 
even the whole truth; it includes whatever the French 
Revolution, or any Revolution, could mean. Napoleon, in 
his first period, was a true Democrat. And yet by the 
nature of him, fostered too by his military trade, he knew 
that Democracy, if it were a true thing at all, could not be an 
anarchy : the man had a heart-hatred for anarchy. On that 
Twentieth of June (1792) , Bourrienne and he sat in a coffee- 
house, as the mob rolled by : Napoleon expresses the deepest 
contempt for persons in authority that they do not restrain 
this rabble. On the Tenth of August he wonders why there 
is no man to command these poor Swiss; they would con- 
quer if there were. Such a faith in Democracy, yet hatred 
of anarchy, it is that carries Napoleon through all his great 
work. Through his brilliant Italian Campaigns, onwards 
to the Peace of Leoben, one would say, his inspiration is: 
' Triumph to the French Revolution; assertion of it against 



232 LECTURES ON HEROES 

'these Austrian Simulacra that pretend to call it a Simul- 
acrum ! ' Withal, however, he feels, and has a right to feel, 
how necessary a strong Authority is; how the Revolution 
cannot prosper or last without such. To bridle-in that great 
devouring, self-devouring French Revolution; to tame it, so 
that its intrinsic purpose can be made good, that it may be- 
come organic, and be able to Hve among other organisms and 
formed things, not as a wasting destruction alone: is not 
this still what he partly aimed at, as the true purport of 
his hfe; nay what he actually managed to do? Through 
Wagrams, Austerlitzes ; triumph after triumph, — he tri- 
umphed so far. There was an eye to see in this man, a soul 
to dare and do. He rose naturally to be the King. All men 
saw that he was such. The common soldiers used to say 
on the march: "These babbling Avocats, up at Paris; all 
talk and no work! What wonder it runs all wrong? We 
shall have to go and put our Petit Caporal there!" They 
went, and put him there; they and France at large. Chief- 
consulship, Emperorship, victory over Europe; — till the 
poor Lieutenant of La Fbre, not unnaturally, might seem to 
himself the greatest of all men that had been in the world 
for some ages. 

But at this point, I think, the fatal charlatan-element got 
the upper hand. He apostatised from his old faith in Facts, 
took to believing in Semblances ; strove to connect himself 
with Austrian Dynasties, Popedoms, with the old false Feu- 
dalities which he once saw clearly to be false; — considered 
that he would found "his Dynasty" and so forth; that the 
enormous French Revolution meant only that! The man 
was ' given-up to strong delusion, that he should believe a 
lie;' a fearful but most sure thing. He did not know true 
from false now when he looked at them, — the fearfulest 
penalty a man pays for yielding to untruth of heart. Self 
and false ambition had now become his god : seZ/-deception 
once yielded to, all other deceptions follow naturally more 
and more. What a paltry patchwork of theatrical paper- 
mantles, tinsel and mummery, had this man wrapt his own 
great reality in, thinking to make it more real thereby ! His 



THE HERO AS KING 233 

hollow Fope's-Concordat, pretending to be a reestablishment 
of Catholicism, felt by himself to be the method of extirpat- 
ing it, '' la vaccine de la religion : " his ceremonial Corona- 
tions, consecrations by the old Italian Chimera in Notre- 
Dame, — " wanting nothing to complete the pomp of it, " as 
Augereau said, "nothing but the half-million of men who 
had died to put an end to all that ! " Cromwell's Inaugura- 
tion was by the Sword and Bible; what we must call a 
genuinely true one. Sword and Bible were borne before him, 
without any chimera: were not these the real emblems of 
Puritanism; its true decoration and insignia? It had used 
them both in a very real manner, and pretended to stand by 
them now! But this poor Napoleon mistook: he believed 
too much in the Dupeahility of men; saw no fact deeper in 
man than Hunger and this! He was mistaken. Like a 
man that should build upon cloud; his house and he fall 
down in confused wreck, and depart out of the world. 

Alas, in all of us this charlatan-element exists ; and might 
be developed, were the temptation strong enough. ' Lead us 
not into temptation ' ! But it is fatal, I say, that it he de- 
veloped. The thing into which it enters as a cognisable 
ingredient is doomed to be altogether transitory; and, how- 
ever huge it may look, is in itself small. Napoleon's work- 
ing, accordingly, what was it with all the noise it made? A 
flash as of gunpowder wide-spread; a blazing-up as of dry 
heath. For an hour the whole Universe seems wrapt in 
smoke and flame; but only for an hour. It goes out: the 
Universe with its old mountains and streams, its stars above 
and kind soil beneath, is still there. 

The Duke of Weimar told his friends always. To be of 
courage; this Napoleonism was unjust, a falsehood, and 
could not last. It is true doctrine. The heavier this Na- 
poleon trampled on the world, holding it tyrannously down, 
the fiercer would the world's recoil against him be, one day. 
Injustice pays itself with frightful compound-interest. I 
am not sure but he had better have lost his best park of 
artillery, or had his best regiment drowned in the sea, than 
shot that poor German Bookseller, Palm! It was a pal- 



234 LECTURES ON HEROES 

pable tyrannous murderous injustice, which no man, let him 
paint an inch thick, could make-out to be other. It burnt 
deep into the hearts of men, it and the like of it; suppressed 
fire flashed in the eyes of men, as they thought of it, — wait- 
ing their day ! Which day came: Germany rose round him. 
— What Napoleon did will in the long-run amount to what 
he did justly; what Nature with her laws will sanction. To 
what of reality was in him ; to that and nothing more. The 
rest was all smoke and waste. La carriere ouverte aux talens: 
that great true Message, which has yet to articulate and fulfil 
itself everywhere, he left in a most inarticulate state. He 
was a great Sbauche, a rude-draught never completed; as 
indeed what great man is other? Left in too rude a state, 
alas ! 

His notions of the world, as he expresses them there at 
St. Helena, are almost tragical to consider. He seems to feel 
the most unaffected surprise that it has all gone so ; that he 
is flung-out on the rock there, and the World is still moving 
on its axis. France is great, and all-great; and at bottom, 
he is France. England itself, he says, is by Nature only an 
appendage of France; "another Isle of Oleron to France. " 
So it was by Nature, by Napoleon-Nature; and yet look how 
in fact — Here am I! He cannot understand it: incon- 
ceivable that the reality has not corresponded to his pro- 
gram of it; that France was not all-great, that he was not 
France. ' Strong delusion, ' that he should believe the thing 
to be which is not! The compact, clear-seeing, decisive 
Italian nature of him, strong, genuine, which he once had, 
has enveloped itself, half-dissolved itself, in a turbid atmos- 
phere of French fanfaronade. The world was not disposed 
to be trodden-down underfoot; to be bound into masses, 
and built together, as he liked, for a pedestal to France and 
him: the world had quite other purposes in view! Na- 
poleon^s astonishment is extreme. But alas, what help 
now? He had gone that way of his; and Nature also had 
gone her way. Having once parted with Reality, he 
tumbles helpless in Vacuity; no rescue for him. He had 
to sink there, mournfully as man seldom did; and break 



THE HERO AS KING 235 

his great heart, and die, — this poor Napoleon: a great im- 
plement too soon wasted, till it was useless: our last Great 
Man! 

Our last, in a double sense. For here finally these wide 
roamings of ours through so many times and places, in 
search and study of Heroes, are to terminate. I am sorry 
for it: there was pleasure for me in this business, if also 
much pain. It is a great subject, and a most grave and 
wide one, this which, not to be too grave about it, I have 
named Hero-Worship. It enters deeply, as I think, into 
the secret of Mankind's ways and vitalest interests in this 
world, and is well worth explaining at present. With six 
months, instead of six days, we might have done better. I 
promised to break-ground on it ; I know not whether I have 
even managed to do that. I have had to tear it up in the 
rudest manner in order to get into it at all. Often enough, 
with these abrupt utterances thrown-out isolated, unex- 
plained, has your tolerance been put to the trial. Tolerance, 
patient candour, all-hoping favour and kindness, which I 
will not speak of at present. The accomplished and dis- 
tinguished, the beautiful, the wise, something of what is 
best in England, have listened patiently to my rude words. 
With many feelings, I heartily thank you all;~ and say. 
Good be with you all ! 



SUMMARY 



LECTURE I 

THE HERO AS DIVINITY. ODIN. PAGANISM : SCANDINAVIAN 
MYTHOLOGY, 

Heroes : Universal History consists essentially of their united Biog- 
raphies. Religion not a man's church-creed, but his practical belief 
about himself and the Universe: Both with Men and Nations it is 
the One fact about them which creatively determines all the rest. 
Heathenism: Christianity: Modern Scepticism. The Hero as Di- 
vinity., Paganism a fact; not Quackery, nor Allegory: Not to be 
pretentiously 'explained;' to be looked at as old Thought, and 
with sympathy. — Nature no more seems divine except to the 
Prophet or Poet, because men have ceased to think : To the Pagan 
Thinker, as to a child-man, all was either godlike or God. Canopus: 
Man. Hero-worship the basis of Religion, Loyalty, Society. A 
Hero not the 'creature of the time:' Hero-worship indestructible. 
Johnson: Voltaire. — Scandinavian Paganism the Religion of our 
Fathers. Iceland, the home of the Norse Poets, described. The 
Edda. The primary characteristic of Norse Paganism, the imperson- 
ation of the visible workings of Nature. Jotuns and the Gods. Fire: 
Frost: Thunder: The Sun: Sea-Tempest. My thus of the Creation : 
The Life-Tree Igdrasil. The modern ^Machine of the Universe.' 

— The Norse Creed, as recorded, the summation of several succes- 
sive systems: Originally the shape given to the national thought 
by their first 'Man of Genius.' Odin: He has no history or date; 
yet was no mere adjective, but a man of flesh and blood. How 
deified. The World of Nature, to every man a Fantasy of Himself. 

— Odin the inventor of Runes, of Letters and Poetry. His re- 
ception as a Hero : the pattern Norse-Man ; a God : His shadow over 
the whole History of his People. — The essence of Norse Pagan- 
ism, not so much Morality, as a sincere recognition of Nature: Sin- 
cerity better than Gracefulness. The Allegories, the after-creations 
of the Faith. Main practical Belief: Hall of Odin: Valkyrs: Des- 

236 



SUMMARY 237 

tiny: Necessity of Valour, Its worth: Their Sea-Kings, Wood- 
cutter Kings, our spiritual Progenitors. The growth of Odinism. 
— The strong simplicity of Norse lore quite unrecognised by 
Gray. Thor's veritable Norse rage: Balder, the white Sungod. 
How the old Norse heart loves the Thunder-god, and sports with 
him : Huge Brobdingnag genius, needing only to be tamed-down, into 
Shalvspeares, Goethes. Truth in the Norse Songs: This World a 
show. Thor's Invasion of Jotunheim. The Ragnarok, or Twilight 
of the Gods: The Old must die, that the New and Better may be 
born. Thor's last appearance. The Norse Creed a Consecration of 
Valour. It and the whole Past a possession of the Present. 



LECTURE II. 



THE HERO AS PROPHET. MAHOMET! ISLAM. 

The Hero no longer regarded as a God, but as one god-inspired. 
All Heroes primarily of the same stuff; differing according to their 
reception. The welcome of its Heroes, the truest test of an epoch. 
Odin: Burns. — Mahomet a true Prophet; not a scheming Im- 
postor. A Great Man, and therefore first of all a sincere man : 
No man to be judged merely by his faults. David the Hebrew King. 
Of all acts for man repentance the most divine: The deadliest 
sin, a supercilious consciousness of none. — Arabia described. The 
Arabs always a gifted people; of wild strong feelings, and of iron 
restraint over these. Their Religiosity: Their Star-worship: Their 
Prophets and inspired men; from Job downwards. Their Holy 
Places. Mecca, its site, history and government. — Mahomet. His 
youth: His fond Grandfather. Had no book-learning: Travels to 
the Syrian Fairs; and first comes in contact with the Christian 
Religion. An altogether solid, brotherly, genuine man: A good 
laugh, and a good flash of anger in him withal. — Marries Kad- 
ijah. Begins his Prophet-career at forty years of age. Allah Akbar; 
God is great: Islam; we must submit to God, Do we not all 
live in Islam? Mahomet, 'the Prophet of God.' — The good Kad- 
ijah believes in him: Mahomet's gratitude. His slow progress: 
Among forty of his kindred, young Ali alone joined him. His good 
Uncle expostulates with him : Mahomet, bursting into tears, persists 
in his mission. The Hegira. Propagating by the sword; First get 
your sword: A thing will propagate itself as it can. Nature a just 
umpire. Mahomet's Creed unspeakably better than the wooden 
idolatries and jangling Syrian Sects extirpated by it. — The Koran, 
the universal standard of Mahometan life: An imperfectly, badly 



238 SUMMARY 

written, but genuine book: Enthusiastic extempore preaching, amid 
the hot haste of wrestUng with flesh-and-blood and spiritual 
enemies. Its direct poetic insight. The World, Man, human Com- 
passion ; all wholly miraculous to Mahomet. — His religion did 
not succeed by 'being easy:' None can. The sensual part of it 
not of Mahomet's making. He himself, frugal; patched his own 
clothes; proved a hero in a rough actual trial of twenty -three years. 
Traits of his generosity and resignation. His total freedom from 
cant. — His moral precepts not always of the superfinest sort; yet 
is there always a tendency to good in them. His Heaven and 
Hell sensual, yet not altogether so. Infinite Nature of Duty. The 
evil of sensuality, in the slavery to pleasant things, not in the enjoy- 
ment of them. Mahometanism a religion heartily believed. To the 
Arab Nation it was as a birth from darkness into light : Arabia first 
became alive by means of it. 



LECTURE III. 



THE HERO AS POET. DANTE ; SHAKSPEARE. 

The Hero as Divinity or Prophet, inconsistent with the modern 
progress of science : The Hero Poet, a figure common to all ages. All 
Heroes at bottom the same; the different sphere constituting the 
grand distinction: Examples. Varieties of aptitude. — Poet and 
Prophet meet in Vates: Their Gospel the same, for the Beautiful 
and the Good are one. All men somewhat of poets ; and the highest 
Poets far from perfect. Prose, and Poetry or musical Thought. 
Song a kind of inarticulate unfathomable speech : All deep things are 
Song. The Hero as Divinity, as Prophet, and then only as Poet, no 
indication that our estimate of the Great Man is diminishing: The 
Poet seems to be losing caste, but it is rather that our notions of 
God are rising higher. — Shakspeare and Dante, Saints of Poetry. 
Dante: His history, in his Book and Portrait. His scholastic edu- 
cation, and its fruit of subtlety. His miseries: Love of Beatrice: 
His marriage not happy. A banished man : Will never return, if to 
plead guilty be the condition. His wanderings : " Come h duro calle. " 
At the Court of Delia Scala. The great soul of Dante, homeless on 
earth, made its home more and more m Eternity. His mystic, 
unfathomable Song. Death: Buried at Ravenna. — His Divina 
Commedia a Song : Go deep enough, there is music everywhere. The 
sincerest of Poems : It has all been as if molten, in the hottest furnace 
of his soul. Its Intensity, and Pictorial power. The three parts 
make-up the true Unseen World of the Middle Ages : How the Chris- 



SUMMARY 239 

tian Dante felt Good and Evil to be the two polar elements of 
this Creation. Paganism andChristianism. — Ten silent centuries 
found a voice in Dante. The thing that is uttered from the inmost 
parts of a man's soul differs altogether from what is uttered by the 
outer. The ' uses ' of Dante : We will not estimate the Sun by the 
quantity of gas it saves us. Mahomet and Dante contrasted. Let 
a man do his work; the fruit of it is the care of Another than 
he. — As Dante embodies musically the Inner Life of the Middle 
Ages, so does Shakspeare embody the Outer life which grew there- 
from. The strange outbudding of English Existence which we call 
'Elizabethan Era.' Shakspeare the chief of all Poets: His calm, 
all-seeing Intellect: His marvellous Portrait - painting. — The 
Poet's first gift, as it is all men's, that he have intellect enough, — 
that he be able to see. . Intellect the summary of all human gifts: 
Human intellect and vulpine intellect contrasted. Shakspeare's 
instinctive unconscious greatness : His works a part of Nature, and 
partaking of her inexhaustible depth. Shakspeare greater than 
Dante; in that he not only sorrowed, but triumphed over his sor- 
TQMS — His mirthfulness, and genuine overflowing love of laughter. 
His Historical Plays, a kind of National Epic. The Battle of Agin- 
court: A noble Patriotism, far other than the 'indifference' some- 
times ascribed to him. His works, like so many windows, through 
which we see glimpses of the world that is in him. — Dante 
the melodious Priest of Middle-Age Catholicism : Out of this Shak- 
speare too there rises a kind of Universal Psalm, not unfit to make 
itself heard among still more sacred Psalms. Shakspeare an ' uncon- 
scious Prophet ;' and therein greater and truer than Mahomet. This 
poor Warwickshire Peasant worth more to us than a whole regiment 
of highest Dignitaries: Indian Empire, or Shakspeare, — which? An 
English King, whom no time or chance can dethrone : A rallying- 
sign and bond of brotherhood for all Saxondom : Wheresoever Eng- 
lish men and women are, they will say to one another, 'Yes, this 
Shakspeare is owrs /' 



LECTURE IV. 



THE HERO AS PRIEST. LUTHER; REFORMATION: KNOX; PURITANISM. 

The Priest a kind of Prophet; but more familiar, as the daily en- 
lightener of daily life. A true Reformer he who appeals to Heaven's 
invisible justice against Earth's visible force. The finished Poet 
often a symptom that his epoch has reached perfection, and finished. 
Alas, the battling Reformer, too, is at times a needful and inevitable 



240 SUMMARY 

phenomenon: Offences do accumulate, till they become insupport- 
able. Forms of Belief, modes of life must perish; yet the Good 
of the Past survives, an everlasting possession for us all. —Idols 
or visible recognised Symbols, common to all Religions: Hateful 
only when insincere: The property of every Hero, that he come 
back to sincerity, to reality : Protestantism and ' private judgment. ' 
No living communion possible among men who believe only in hear- 
says. ' The Hero-Teacher, who delivers men out of darkness into 
light. Not abolition of Hero-worship does Protestantism mean; 
but rather a whole World of Heroes, of sincere, believing men. 
— Luther ; his obscure, seemingly-insignificant birth. His youth 
schooled in adversity and stern reality. Becomes a Monk. His 
religious despair: Discovers a Latin Bible: No wonder he should 
venerate the Bible. He visits Rome. Meets the Pope's fire by fire. 
At the Diet of Worms : The greatest moment in the modern History 
of men. — The Wars that followed are not to be charged to 
the Reformation. The Old Religion once true: The cry of 'No 
Popery' foolish enough in these days. Protestantism not dead: 
German Literature and the French Revolution rather considerable 
signs of life! — How Luther held the sovereignty of the Refor- 
mation and kept Peace while he lived. His written Works : Their 
rugged homely strength: His dialect became the language of a 1 
writing. No mortal heart to be called braver, ever lived in that 
Teutonic Kindred, whose character is valour: Yet a most gentle 
heart withal, full of pity and love, as the truly valiant heart ever is: 
Traits of character from his Table-Talk: His daughter's Deathbed: 
The miraculous in Nature. His love of Music. His Portrait. — 
Puritanism the only phase of Protestantism that ripened into a 
living faith: Defective enough, but genuine. Its fruit in the world. 
The sailing of the Mayflower from Delft Haven the beginning of 
American Saxondom. In the history of Scotland properly but one 
epoch of world-interest,^the Reformation by Knox: A 'nation of 
heroes;' a believing nation. The Puritanism of Scotland became 
that of England, of New England. — Knox 'guilty' of being the 
bravest of all Scotchmen : Did not seek the post of Prophet. At 
the siege of St. Andrew's Castle. Emphatically a sincere man. A 
Galley-slave on the River Loire. An Old-Hebrew Prophet, in the 
guise of an Edinburgh Minister of the Sixteenth Century. — 
Knox and Queen Mary: 'Who are you, that presume to school the 
nobles and sovereign of this realm? ' ' Madam, a subject born within 
the same.' His intolerance — of falsehoods and knaveries. Not a 
mean acrid man ; else he had never been virtual President and Sov- 
ereign of Scotland. His unexpected vein of drollery: A cheery 
social man; practical, cautious-hopeful, patient. His ' devout imagi- 
nation' of a Theocracy, or Government of God. Hildebrand wished 
a Theocracy; Cromwell wished it, fought for it: Mahomet attained 
it. In one form or other, it is the one thing to be struggled for. 



SUMMARY 241 



LECTURE V. 



THE HERO AS MAN OF LETTERS. JOHNSON, ROUSSEAU, BURNS. 

The Hero as Man of Letters altogether a product of these new 
ages: A Heroic Soul in very strange guise. Literary men; genuine 
and spurious. Fichte's 'Divine Idea of the World:' His notion of 
the True Man of Letters. Goethe, the Pattern Literary Hero. 
■ — The disorganised condition of Literature, the summary of 
all other modem disorganisations. The Writer of a true Book 
our true modern Preacher. Miraculous influence of Books: The 
Hebrew Bible. Books are now our actual University, our Church, 
our Parliament. With Books, Democracy is inevitable. Thought 
the true thaumaturgic influence, by which man works all things 
whatsoever. — Organisation of the ' Literary Guild : ' Needful dis- 
cipline; 'priceless lessons' of Poverty. The Literary Priesthood, 
and its importance to society. Chinese Literary Governors. Fallen 
into strange times; and strange things need to be speculated upon. 
— An age of Scepticism: The very possibility of Heroism for- 
mally abnegated. Benthamism an eyeless Heroism. Scepticism, 
Spiritual Paralysis, Insincerity: Heroes gone-out; Quacks come-in. 
Our brave Chatham himself lived the strangest mimetic life all along. 
Violent remedial re\ailsions: Chartisms, French Revolutions: The 
Age of Scepticism passing away. Let each Man look to the mend- 
ing of his own life. — Johnson one of our Great English Souls. 
His miserable Youth and Hypochondria : Stubborn Self -Help. His 
loyal submission to what is really higher than himself. How he 
stood by the old Formulas: Not less original for that. Formulas: 
Their Use and Abuse. Johnson's unconscious sincerity. His Two- 
fold Gospel, a kind of Moral Prudence and clear Hatred of Cant. 
His writings sincere and full of substance. Architectural nobleness 
of his Dictionary. Boswell, with all his faults, a true hero-worship- 
per of a true Hero. — Rousseau a morbid, excitable, spasmodic 
man ; intense rather than strong. Had not the invaluable ' talent 
of Silence.' His Face, expressive of his character. His Egoism: 
Hungry for the praises of men. His books: Passionate appeals, 
which did once more struggle towards Reality: A Prophet to his 
Time; as he could, and as the Time could. Rosepink, and artificial 
bedizenment. Fretted, exasperated, till the heart of him went mad: 
He could be cooped, starving, into garrets; laughed at as a maniac; 
but he could not be hindered from setting the world on fire. 
— Bums a genuine Hero, in a withered, unbelieving, secondhand Cen- 
tury. The largest soul of all the British lands, came among us in 
the shape of a hard-handed Scottish Peasant. His heroic I ather and 
Mother, and their sore struggle through life. His rough untutored 
16 



242 SUMMARY 

dialect: Affectionate joyousness. His writings a poor fragment 
of him. His conversational gifts : High duchesses and low ostlers 
alike fascinated by him. — Resemblance between Burns and Mir- 
abeau. Official Superiors: The greatest 'thinking-faculty' in this 
land superciliously dispensed with. Hero-worship under strange 
conditions. The notable phasis of Burns's history his visit to Edin- 
burgh. For one man who can stand prosperity, there are a hundred 
that will stand adversity. Literary Lionism. 



LECTURE VI. 



THE HERO AS KING. CROMWELL, NAPOLEON: MODERN REVO- 
LUTIONISM. 

The King the most important of Great Men ; the summary of all 
the various figures of Heroism. To enthrone the Ablest Man, the 
true business of all Social procedure; The Ideal of Constitutions. 
Tolerable and intolerable approximations. Divine Rights and 
Diabolic Wrongs. — The world's sad predicament; that of having 
its Able-Man to seek, and not knowing in what manner to pro- 
ceed about it. The Era of Modern Revolutionism dates from Luther. 
The French Revolution no mere act of General Insanity : Truth clad 
in hell-fire ; the Trump of Doom to Plausibilities and Empty Routine. 
The cry of ' Liberty and Equality ' at bottom the repudiation of sham 
Heroes. Hero-worship exists forever and everywhere; from divine 
adoration down to the common courtesies of man and man: The 
soul of Order, to which all things. Revolutions included, work. Some 
Cromwell or Napoleon the necessary finish of a Sansculottism. The 
manner in which Kings were made, and Kingship itself first 
took rise. — Puritanism a section of the universal war of Belief 
against Make-believe. Laud a weak ill-starred Pedant ; in his spas- 
modic vehemence heeding no voice of prudence, no cry of pity. 
Universal necessity for true Forms: How to. distinguish between 
True and False. The nakedest Reality preferable to any empty 
Semblance, however dignified. — The work of the Puritans. The 
Sceptical Eighteenth century, and its constitutional estimate of 
Cromwell and his associates. No wish to disparage such characters 
as Hampden, Eliot, Pym; a most constitutional, unblamable, dig- 
nified set of men. The rugged outcast Cromwell, the man of them 
all in whom one still finds human stuff. The One thing worth re- 
volting for. — Cromwell's 'hypocrisy,' an impossible theory. His 
pious Life as a Farmer until forty years of age. His public suc- 
cesses honest successes of a brave man. His participation in the 



SUMMARY 243 

King's death no ground of condemnation. His eye for facts no 
hypocrite's gift. His Ironsides the embodiment of this insight of 
his. — Know the men that may be trusted: Alas, this is yet, in 
these days, very far from us. Cromwell's hypochondria: His re- 
puted confusion of speech: His habit of prayer. His speeches un- 
premeditated and full of meaning. His reticences: called 'lying' 
and ' dissimulation : ' Not one falsehood proved against him. 
— Foolish charge of 'ambition.' The great Empire of Silence: 
Noble silent men, scattered here and there, each in his depart- 
ment; silently thinking, silently hoping, silently working. Two kinds 
of ambition; one wholly blamable, the other laudable, inevitable: 
How it actually was with Cormwell. — Hume's Fanatic-Hypocrite 
theory. How indispensable everywhere a King is, in all movements 
of men. Cromwell, as King of Puritanism, of England. Consti- 
tutional palaver: Dismissal of the Rump Parliament. Cromwell's 
Parliaments and Protectorship: Parliaments having failed, there 
remained nothing for him but the way of Despotism. His closing 
days: His poor old Mother. It was not to men's judgments 
that he appealed; nor have men judged him very well. — The 
French Revolution, the 'third act' of Protestantism. Napoleon 
infected with the quackeries of his age: Had a kind of sincerity, — 
an instinct towards the practical. His faith, — 'the Tools to him that 
can handle them, ' the whole truth of Democracy .- His heart-hatred 
of Anarchy. Finally, his quackeries got the upper hand: He would 
found a 'Dynasty:' Believed wholly in the dupability of Men. 
This Napoleonism was unjust, a falsehood, and could not last. 



NOTES 



[The first numeral refers to the page of the text, and the second to the line.] 

I — 10. Universal History ... is at bottom the History of the 
Great Men. This is a favorite idea with Carlyle. He was always 
opposed to the belief that history could be made into an exact 
science, and the doings of men explained as the result of natural 
causes. If it is not the result of natural causes, then it must be 
very largely the result of the lives of certain great men. This idea 
leads him, a few lines later, to speak of the great man as "sent into 
the world," — a thought to which he often returns. 

2 — 8. The light which enlightens. Find, in the first chapter of 
John, the verses to which Carlyle seems to be indebted here. The 
sentence is confusing at first sight; supply "He is" at the beginning 
of it to make the meaning clearer. This is the first of many instances 
where Bible thoughts and Bible phraseology have left their trace. 

2 — 21. In such times as these. The reason for his objection to 
them Carlyle gives a few pages further on (p. 12, 11. 20-28), and 
several times later. There was good reason for his complaint. 
This was a particularly sterile time in English literature; the chief 
Romantic poets had been dead for some time or had ceased to write, 
and Tennyson and Browning had not yet appeared in their full 
power. 

2 — 22. The divine relation. If the great man is specially 
"sent" into the world, then his relation to other men must be 
"divine." The dealing with history from this point of view thus 
becomes not a secular but a religious subject; and so religion is 
necessarily the next topic which Carlyle takes up. 

3 — 6. Creatively determines. Carlyle merely means that "As a 
man thinketh, so is he." Carlyle uses " Christianism " instead of 
Christianity, in order to get away from the mass of conventional 
associations, the "church-creeds" and "articles of faith," to the 
very spirit of Christianity itself. 

3 — 1 8. Time, through every meanest moment of it, resting on 
Eternity. "Meanest" in the sense of "smallest"; every individual 
moment. The passage may simply be taken to refer to the part 



NOTES 245 

that immortality plays in Christianity. With Carlyie it has also 
a certain philosophical significance. 

4 — 8. Stocks and stones. Compare Isaiah xliv, 19, "Shall I fall 
down to the stock of a tree?" Carlyie shows his bitter hatred of 
idolatry when he speaks later of the hostility to it of all true prophets, 
— notably of Mahomet and of Luther. 

4 — 20. Mere quackery. See note on 42 — 37. 

5 — 2. With which . . . with them. A loose but effective fash- 
ion of "ViTiting. 

5 — 4. Man everywhere is the born enemy of lies. This is at the 
bottom of Carlyle's optimism. Compare Emerson's "Truth, on 
whose side we always heart.ily are." 

5 — 5. Grand Lamaism, The religion of Thibet. The Grand 
Lama, or head of the church, is supposed before his death to reveal 
to his priests in what child he will be reincarnated. The priests 
search for the infant and proclaim him Grand Lama. 

5 — 19. The eldest-born of a certain genealogy. The English 
method of selecting the king or lord by the chance of birth alone 
Carlyie felt to be inadequate, and so he chooses self-made men for 
his lecture on " The Hero as King." But later he somewhat changed 
his point of view. Twenty-five years after this he wrote: "There 
is a great deal more in genealogy than is generally believed at 
present." 

5 — 29. Allegory. This theory had been developed by Hume, the 
skeptical eighteenth century Scottish philosopher, whom Carlyie 
studied carefully though without sympathy. This theory has of 
late received the attention of many scholars, and has been applied 
in various fields of learning, both secular and religious. 

6 — 9. Man's life ... a stern reality. Think of Carlyle's own 
life as influencing him in the writing of this passage. 

6 — 15. All Religions are symbols of that, altering always as that 
alters. The crudest reflection of "what men felt and knew about 
the Universe" was a Pagan idolatry, and Carlyie recognized a cer- 
tain truth and beauty in that so long as it remained sincere (p. 119, 
1. 4). But religion, to remain true to itself, must alter as men come 
to feel and know more things about the universe. Compare Low- 
ell's The Present Crisis: 

"New occasions teach new duties: time makes ancient good un- 
couth, 
They must upward still and onward who would keep abreast of 
truth." 

7 — I. Imbroglio of Paganism. Imbroglio (pronounced im-broF- 



246 " NOTES 

* 

yo) is an Italian word applied to the plot of a drama or story 
when very complicated or confused. A peculiarly appropriate 
word. 

8 — 1 6. Nescience. Ignorance; here in the sense of the unknow- 
able. Since the world in its last analysis is entirely incomprehensible 
to us, Carlyle feels that we should not give it a name and so ''dis- 
miss it from us," as if we knew all about it, but should allow our- 
selves to be deeply impressed by the fact that it is all "wonderful, 
inscrutable," and this will bring us into the right religious frame 
of mind. Notice how the impression this thought makes upon him 
raises his style in this paragraph and the next. 

8 — 34. How else could it rot? Freely quoted from Sartor 
Resartus. Carlyle is fond of quoting from his own work. That a 
leaf rots by the exercise of a force within itself is true, but not 
inamediately apparent. Many of these semi-philosophical ideas Car- 
lyle had already developed more at length in his Sartor Resartus, 
and he assumes that his audience is familiar with that book. Un- 
less these quotations informally introduced are accredited to some 
other source they are taken from this book or from some of his other 
earlier writings. 

9 — 4. Leyden jars are referred to because Carlyle is continuing 
his illustration of two paragraphs before. The jars are used to 
accumulate electricity. 

9 — 18. The giant Jean Paul. Jean Paul Richter, a mystical and 
eccentric German writer, to whom Carlyle was greatly indebted. 
Carlyle had read all of his fifty volumes, had translated two of them, 
and had written two extended essays on Richter. 

9 — 20. Canopus. A southern constellation. 

9 — 23. The wild Ishmaelitish man. Ishmael, son of Abraham 
and Hagar. "And he will be a wild man ; his hand will be against 
every man, and every man's hand against him" (Genesis xvi, 12). 
Carlyle is fond of using a man's name, often in the plural, to stand 
for the type which he represents, in order to give vividness and 
concreteness to the thought. 

9 — 29. Sabeans. Ancient worshippers of the sun and stars in 
Persia, Arabia, and other Eastern countries. 

9 — 31. Worship is transcendent wonder. A famous definition. 
It is in this sense that "hero-worship" is justified. 

10 — 14. St. Chrysostom. One of the early Christian Fathers 
(fourth century). 

10 — 17. Shekiriah. The Hebrew name for the presence of God, 
made visible in the form of a cloud resting upon the mercy seat on 



NOTES 247 

the top of the ark of the covenant. The full description occurs in 
Exodus, chapter xxv. To say that man is the true shekinah is a 
poetical way of saying that through man God speaks to men, directs 
and inspires and protects them. This is the very centre of Carlyle's 
thought in this book. 

10 — 23. But one Temple. "For ye are the temple of the living 
God" (2 Corinthians vi, 16). Also 1 Cor. iii, 16, and vi, 19. 

10 — 24. The devout Novalis. Friedrich von Hardenburg, one of 
the group of German Romantic philosophers and poets, was another 
of Carlyle's inspirations, and one concerning whom he had already 
written an important and valuable essay. He was a mystic rather 
than an original philosopher, and so "devout" that he believed he 
could be "translated" into the future life, somewhat in the manner 
uf Enoch, in the fulness of health instead of through sickness and 
death. 

10 — 31. We are the miracle of miracles. On page 67 you will 
find Carlyle attributing this thought to Mahomet. Carlyle, like 
Emerson, was very prone to read his own ideas into the ideas of 
his heroes, or to reduce their ideas to his own scheme of things. 
This must be kept in mind as a general warning- against taking 
what he says with too much literalness. 

12 — 3. Or a Hierarchy, for it is * sacred ' enough. This implies 
the correct derivation, from lepoq, sacred; but do not understand 
Carlyle to mean that this is of the same root as "Heroarchy," 
which he translates well enough as "Government of heroes." In 
the next line, the derivation is incorrect (" insupportably inaccurate," 
to use Carlyle 's phrase); king is from the Anglo-Saxon cyng or 
cyning, which means king, and that in turn is related to cyn or 
cynn, which means race, or family, and from which we get our 
word kin, 

12 — 13-19. There have to come revolutions then . . . but 
Hero-worship . . . cannot cease. Notice, throughout the book, 
how Carlyle returns to and develops these two ideas, the negative 
and the positive side of his central contention. The doing away 
with hero-worship and with religious faith in the eighteenth century- 
led to the French Revolution, — for "Is not all loyalty akin to 
religious faith?" But as reverence is a perennial instinct in man, 
the times will improve, and we shall have conservatism in politics 
and faith in religion. Compare page 15, lines 7-18. 

12 — 32. The times call forth? See note on 1 — 10. Notice how the 
next paragraph rounds out this thought and returns anew to the 
opening contention of the lecture. This is typical of Carlyle's 



248 NOTES 

method of giving out a new thought and then recurring to it from 
time to time until by this reiteration the general conviction of it 
grows upon his readers. It will be well to notice this and kindred 
thoughts treated in this way throughout the book. Ask yourselves 
what new light has been thrown on the subject before Carlyle re- 
turns to it again (p. 28, 1. 32). 

13 — 30' Chuneras. Why should this be a favorite word with 
Carlyle? Notice what it stands for, and how Carlyle opposes each 
of his heroes in turn to what is vain and false. (See note on 42 — 37.) 

13 — 35« Boswell venerates his Johnson, right truly. Carlyle 
develops this idea in his lecture on "The Hero as Man of Letters," 
and more especially in his essay on Boswell's Life of Johnson. 
Macaulay had treated Boswell with great contempt in his essay on 
Boswell's Life of Johnson; but to Carlyle any true hero-worshipper 
must have in him much that is deserving of praise. 

14 — 2. This of and "that of" are favorite elliptical expressions of 
Carlyle, by which he gains rapidity of movement at the expense of 
strict rhetorical accuracy. 

14 — 2. Voltaire . . . Persiflage. Carlyle had treated the inci- 
dents in this paragraph more at length in his essay on Voltaire. 
There he had referred to him as "a great persifleur; a man for whom 
life, and all that pertains to it, has, at best, but a despicable mean- 
ing; who meets its difficulties not with earnest force, but with gay 
agility." So persiflage is an insincere worldly wisdom bordering on 
charlatanism. 

14 — 9. Ferney. A Swiss village where Voltaire lived in his old 
age. 

14 — 13. Calases. A characteristic plural; derived from a family 
named Calas, whom Voltaire protected. 

14 — 20. Douanier. A customs-house official. 

14 — 22. Maitre de Poste. A man who owns and lets out horses. 

14 — 23. Va bon train. Make good speed. 

14 — 31. Withered Pontiff of Encyclopedism. Voltaire is so called 
because he was the chief apostle or "priest" of those eighteenth- 
century French skeptical philosophers who elaborated a materialis- 
tic or mechanical theory of the universe in an "Encyclopaedia," 
a fact which has caused them to be known in philosophy as the 
French Encyclopaedists. 

15 — 4. Times of unbelief, which soon have to become times of 
revolution. This Carlyle had already shown in his French Revo- 
lution. Compare note on 12 — 13-19. The particular reason for this 
conclusion may be found on page 115, lines 26 ff. With this para^ 



NOTES 249 

graph Carlyle finishes his general consideration of Hero-worship as 
the basis of all religion, and is ready to begin his more specific study 
of "Heathenism." In the next lecture he will take up Mahometan- 
ism, and then certain phases of Catholic and Protestant Christianity. 
Notice his own Summary, p. 236. 

15 — 36. Iceland. Writing of nature, here as before (pp. 7 
and 8), seems to raise the style of our author. But there it was 
from the sense of mystery suggested by Plato's thought, while here 
it is a response to the wild spirit of our forefathers. The Anglo- 
Saxon poets always rise in dignity and power when they introduce 
the subject of nature, especially in its wilder aspects. Carlyle 
shows his Northern nature here, as well as in his keenly sympathetic 
understanding of the old Norse religion. 

16 — 4. Jokuls. Icelandic snow-capped mountains. 

16 — 16. Saemund. Much of what Carlyle says here has been 
questioned or disproved by later scholarship. 

17 — 9. Frost, Fire, and the other Jotuns and gods here mentioned 
are given their respective names in the following paragraphs. The 
Prose Edda tells us that Asgard was a city built for the gods in the 
middle of the universe by Odin and his brothers. Carlyle refers 
on page 19 to another legend of the forming of Asgard. The abode 
of the giants, Jotunheim, was in the desolate mountainous region 
along the shores of the ocean which was supposed to surround the 
flat plain of earth. 

17 — 35. The Giant Hymir. Compare page 35, lines 2-8. The 
rocks split, of course, from the effect of the cold. 

18 — I. Thor, son of Odin and next to him in importance among 
the Norse gods. As the destroyer of the hostile "Jotuns" he is 
essentially the friend of man, especially of the hard-working peasant. 
On this account, many of the stories told of him were incorporated 
when Christianity succeeded to the Norse religion. The making of 
the sign of Thor's hammer as a spell was a custom which naturally 
gave place to the making of the sign of the cross. 

18 — 8. Balder, the second son of Odin, was even more the friend 
of man than Thor. The Christian missionaries found the resem- 
blance to Christ in the legends of his death and descent into hell 
(Hela), and the prophecy of his return to earth, as well as in the 
dazzling beauty of his person and the purity and gentleness of 
his character. Compare Matthew Arnold's famous poem. Balder 
Dead. 

18 — 14. Grimm was Carlyle 's chief source of information regard- 
ing this whole subject, except, of course, the eddas themselves. 



*250 NOTES 

1 8 — 15. The God Wu'nsch, as Carlyle should have known if he had 
read Grimm more carefully, was hardly open to the objection which 
he brings against him. The god (or the fairy) who would give us 
what we wished for is indeed a "sincere" but "rude" ideal, and 
"the true God" does not do so; but Wiinsch is defined by Grimm 
as standing for "perfection in whatever kind; what we should call 
the Ideal" {Teutonic Mythology, i, 138). 

19 — 24, The caldron. The reference is made sufficiently clear by 
Carlyle himself, on page 35. 

19 — 38. Hyper-Brobdingnagian. Exceeding even the gigantic con- 
ceptions of Swift in the second part of Gulliver's Travels. 

20 — 6. The Tree Igdrasil. It is because the similitude of the 
universe and the tree suggests that the principle of life is at the 
very centre of things and extends to every smallest portion of it 
that Carlyle finds it "beautiful — altogether beautiful and great." 
On page 165 he recurs to this contrast of the tree and machine 
theories of the universe ; but there he makes the conception philo- 
sophical rather than merely poetical. As to the "machine of the 
universe," see note on 14 — 31. 

20 — 12. The Three Nomas, or Norns, were the Past, the Present, 
and the Future. Weird, or Wyrd (the Present), was the Anglo-Saxon 
name for fate and survives in the "weird sisters" in Macbeth. 

20 — 27. Ulfila, or Ulphilas, lived in the fourth century and 
translated the Bible into Gothic. His name is chosen here because 
the fragment we have of this translation is the very oldest record 
of any Teutonic dialect. But our language is what it is, not only 
because of the way it was framed in the early Gothic, but because 
of the way men have spoken "since the first man began to speak." 
This is a concrete instance of "the infinite conjugation of the verb 
To do." 

21 — 22. Odin, as chief of the gods, is rather a general divinity 
than one having a specific province. He gave to men all the 
higher gifts which they possess, both intellectual and spiritual, and 
so is more than any other the god of Wisdom and Culture. On this 
account Carlyle chooses him as "the first Norse man of genius," 
who was, according to this theory, deified. That ancient heroes 
were often converted into divinities is well known; but Carlyle 
soon seems to forget that in Odin's case this is merely a "fancy" of 
his own, and appears to treat the matter as an established fact. 

21 — 29. The sphinx-enigma, the "question of the sphinx" had 
for its answer, Man. So to solve the riddle was to give men assur- 
ance "of their own destiny, "-7-to make the meaning of existence 



NOTES 251 

"articulate" and even "melodious." The significance of the latter 
word is explained by what Carlyle says of song in his lecture on 
"The Hero as Poet." 

22 — I. Sympathetic ink does not show until it is brought out by 
heat or by some preparation made for this purpose. 

22 — 20. Councils of Trebisond, etc. The successive religious coun- 
cils and religious heroes of the Scandinavian belief are lost to sight. 
Carlyle probably intended to take the representative phases of 
Christian theology, using his characteristic plurals for the sake of 
concreteness. Athanasius was the champion of the orthodox side 
of the first great theological controversy, that concerning the divine 
nature of Christ, which was decided at the Council of Nicea in 325; 
Dante is always taken by Carlyle as the great exemplification of 
sincere Catholicism. St. Augustine would have been a better illus- 
tration, since Dante was primarily a poet. Luther, of course, 
stands for the last great development, — that of Protestantism. In 
like manner, as the Council of Trent was called after the Reforma- 
tion, in a vain attempt to bring the Romanists and Protestants 
together again, to make his grouping consistent, the "Council of 
Trebisond" should have been the first important council; but 
unfortunately there was no council of Trebisond at all. 

22 — 38. Twelve Peers. Perhaps owing to the influence of the 
twelve sons of Jacob or the twelve apostles of Christ, since the 
country had been nominally converted to Christianity about the 
year 1000. Notice Carlyle's reference to "the number twelve" on 
page 26. 

23 — 2. Asen. Carlyle has already defined Asen as divinities (p. 
17, 1. 13). The view that they were called Asen because they came 
out of Asia is now discredited. 

23 — 7. Saxo Grammaticus. A Danish historian of the twelfth 
century. On page 35 Carlyle speaks of his history as the source of 
Shakespeare's Hamlet. 

23 — II. Torfaeus. An Iceland scholar and historian of the seven- 
teenth century. 

23 — 37. Lope de Vega. A Spanish dramatist contemporary with 
Shakespeare; he was perhaps the most famous literary man of his 
day. He produced an incredible number of plays, poems, etc. ; his 
"perfection" was gained somewhat at the cost of depth. 

24 — 2. Adam Smith. The English economist of the eighteenth 
century. The essay may be found in the volume entitled The 
Theory of Moral Sentiments. A delightful statement of this same 
idea occurs in Prof. Barrett Wendell's English Composition, page 14. 



252 NOTES 

25 — g. Camera-obscura magnifier. As this is both incorrect and 
inappropriate, one is almost tempted to wonder if Carlyle did not 
have in mind the magic lantern. The image in the camera-obscura 
is inverted, is small, bright and clear in outline; the size and shifting 
shadowiness of the magic lantern would at least offer an appropriate 
comparison. But the end of the paragraph shows that the camera- 
obscura was intended as a suggestive comparison, not to be taken 
too literally. Compare his return to the figure on page 28, line 25. 

25 — 14. Arundel-marble. Greek marbles of the third century 
B.C., owned by the Earl of Arundel, afterwards given to Oxford. 
As they contain a record of definite dates in Greek history, they are 
grouped with documents and books, as opposed to "some dumb 
monumental cairn." 

25 — 21. Theoremed. Another favorite word of Carlyle's. These 
matters cannot be put into logical theorems,, because the mere 
understanding is not capable of dealing with them. 

26 — 5. * Image of his own Dream.' Quoted from Novalis. The 
thought in the first part of the paragraph, that we see things as we 
do because we are constituted as we are, as cut glass reflects the 
light according to the way it is cut, is clear enough. But here the 
thought is shifted to mean that man not only distorts but creates 
the images which he sees ; that the world he looks upon, the world 
of Nature, is not a real world but only a "Phantasy of Himself," 
the "Image of his own Dream." The point is stated more clearly 
by Emerson in his essay on Experience : *' We have learned that we 
do not see directly but mediately, and that we have no means of 
correcting these colored and distorting lenses which we are, or of 
computing the amount of their errors. Perhaps these subject- 
lenses have a creative power; perhaps there are no objects" (Col- 
lected Works, Riverside edition, vol. iii, p. 77). 

26 — 17. Cestus of Venus. The girdle of Venus (Aphrodite) is 
thus referred to in the Iliad, xiv, 214 ff: "The broidered girdle, fair- 
wrought, wherein are all her enchantments; therein are love, and 
desire, and loving converse, that seals the wits even of the wise." 
(Translation by Lang, Leaf, and Myers.) The essay referred to, 
"On Grace and Dignity," is contained in the volume of Aesthetic 
and Philosophical Essays in the Bohn Library. Schiller's idea is 
that the cestus was intended to represent the harmony between 
sensuous and moral beauty. 

26 — 34. Atahualpa. The last native king of Peru, who was taken 
by the Spanish in 1532. Dies is the Spanish for God. 

27 — 18. A Hero is a Hero at all points. This is the first state- 



NOTES 253 

ment of one of the fundamental doctrines of the book. Compare 
note on 12 — 32, and keep track of the way Carlyle develops his idea. 

27 — 31. A great thought in the wild, deep heart of him. This 
expression affords an opportunity somewhat like the one suggested 
in the last note. As you read on, notice to how many of his heroes 
Carlyle applies almost these same words, and consider to what 
extent his own life and character may have influenced him in his 
use of such an expression. 

28 — 7. Wednesbury, etc. English towns. 

28 — 23. Such, under new conditions. Carlyle's best statement 
of this idea is that given on page 174, lines 32 ff. 

29 — 35. Sincerity, I think, is better than grace. Sincerity with 
Carlyle is the one absolute essential. Compare note on 27 — 31, and 
notice which of the characteristics mentioned in this paragraph 
occur later. 

30 — 30. Valkyrs. More commonly known as Valkyries. The 
Prose Edda says : " Odin sends them to every field of battle to make 
choice of those who are to be slain, and to sway the victory." 

30 — 31. Hall of Odin. Valhalla, the Norse heaven. 

30 — 31. An inflexible Destiny: and that the one thing needful 
for a man was to be brave. The old Teutonic mind did not per- 
ceive any contradiction here. Beowulf remarks, "Wyrd often 
saves the un doomed hero, provided his own courage is sufficient." 

30 — 36. For all earnest men. Emerson agrees with Carlyle that 
the strong men are always believers in destiny. 

31 — 33. Silent . . . unconscious that they were specially brave. 
Here Carlyle seems to be reading his own ideals into his heroes (cf. 
note on 10 — 31). The Northern heroes were as boastful as they 
were brave, and appear to have thought no harm of it. Beowulf 
"utters boast-words," and the poet seems to approve this as much 
as he does the brave deeds of which he boasted. 

31 — 37. Agamemnon's was a small audacity. Though Homer 
sang, in the Iliad, of his expedition against Troy, this was a small 
adventure, "audacity" in a good sense, compared, for instance, to 
RoUo's sailing down to France and winning for himself and his men 
the kingdom of Normandy. William the Conqueror was the direct 
descendant of Rollo. 

32 — 38. Like a Banyan-tree. " The Indian fig-tree . . . remarka- 
ble for sending down from its branches roots which, striking into 
the ground, themselves become trunks, so that a single tree some- 
times covers a space 1500 feet in circumference." — Worcester's 
Dystionaryo 



254 NOTES 

33 — 8. The Cow Adumbla. Described in the Prose Edda as 
"licking the rime from the rocks." This caused the rocks to pro- 
duce in three days the body of a man, the grandfather of Odin. 

33 — 21. VOluspa, or "The Sybil's Prophecy." It is regarded as 
perhaps the high-water mark of the old Norse poetry, and is largely 
paraphrased in the Prose Edda. The traces of Christian influence 
in it indicate that it must have been put together about the year 
1000. It contains an accoimt of the Creation, of the World-Tree, 
the death of Balder, and the war in heaven ; and by way of proph- 
ecy it tells of the destruction of the world, the death of the gods, 
and the return of Balder to a new order of things. 

33 — 30- Gray's fragments. The poet Thomas Gray was engaged 
during the last part of his life in the study and translation of this 
old Northern literature. His famous poems. The Fatal Sisters 
and The Descent of Odin, are free translations from the old Norse. 
Modem criticism supports Carlyle in saying that Gray read into 
these old poems much of his own love of the mysterious and of 
"awe and horror." Pope's translation of Homer is famous for its 
changing of *the old Homeric spirit into the well-regulated manner 
of the eighteenth century. 

33 — 32. Ashlar marble. Thin layers of marble to face a building 
made of some other material. The "black ashlar marble" is Gray's 
translation of what is really, in the original, " rough as the North 
rocks." 

34 — 7. Frigga, the wife of Odin, stands for Mother Earth. Her- 
moder is her son, the brother of Balder, so it is especially appropriate 
that he should be sent. 

34 — 19. Thimble. Here Carlyle is a worse offender than Gray in 
inserting his own point of view. Nanna sent a ring, not a thimble, 
which quite spoils the effect of the "Ah me! — " 

34 — 25. Uhland. A distinguished German poet contemporary 
with Carlyle. His essay had been published four years before. 
Carlyle kept well abreast of the German literature of his time. 

34 — 35. Is ever and anon travelling to the country of the Jotuns. 
The editors of the Corpus Poeticum Boreale suggest that this is 
because the poet felt that he would be out of place in Valhalla on 
account of the ludicrous ugliness of his features. 

35 — 36. That this world is after all but a show. This is a re- 
assertion of his Transcendentalism into which Carlyle now tumbles 
"these brave old Northmen." The Hindoo mystics and the Ger- 
man philosophers after Kant did indeed literally interpret the 
world as "a phenomenon or appearance, no real thing." But 



NOTES 255 

Shakespeare surely was only thinking of the transitoriness of human 
life, in a poetical sort of way; and it would be very strange if the 
Norse poets with their daily contact with hard reality and "their 
robust mirth in the middle of these fearful things" could have had 
any such conception (see note on 10 — 31). 

36 — 3. ' We are such stuff as Dreams are made of ! ' The Tempest, 
act iv, scene i, line 156. 

37 — 23. Midgard-snake. As Utgard is Outer Garden (p. 36, 1. 4), 
so Midgard is Middle Garden; the earth being in the middle of 
the surrounding ocean. The Anglo-Saxon word for earth is mid- 
dan-geard. 

38 — 2. Mimer-stithy. Wisdom smithy; since Mimer was the 
owner of the well of wisdom. This word resembles many of the 
old Norse and Anglo-Saxon poetical compounds: ''chin-thicket" — 
beard; "bone-case" — body; "whale-road" or "swan-path" — the 
sea. 

38 — 7. Rare Old Ben. Sir John Young's phrase, "O rare Ben 
Jonson! " is the most famous characterization of him. It appears on 
his epitaph in Westminster Abbey. 

38—9. American Backwoods. The "grim humour" does not fitly 
apply to any American writer whom Carlyle could have known. 
It is probably a general impression gained from some chance story. 

38 — 20. A new Heaven and a new Earth. A biblical phrase. 
Revelation xxi, 1. The last part of the Voluspa begins with this 
idea, probably owing to Christian influence. Carlyle was therefore 
mistaken in saying, "Seemingly a very old, prophetic idea.^' 

38 — 25. A phoenix fire-death. The phoenix is taken as a symbol 
of immortality because it was fabled to rise anew from its ashes 
after destroying itself and its nest with fire. 

38—33. King Olaf. Olaf Haroldsson, called "The Thick-set," 
and his predecessor Olaf Tryggvason were both instrumental in 
introducing Christianity. It was of the earlier of these that the 
legend here given was told; but it was the later Olaf who was 
afterwards known as the Saint. 

39 — 24. Pindar. A Greek poet who wrote odes celebrating the 
Olympian games and other similar contests. In one of these he 
speaks of Poseidon (the sea god, Neptune) as often visiting the 
Isthmian games. The Nemean games were similar to these; this 
is merely a slight error on Carlyle's part. 

40 — 12. Meister. Carlyle had translated Goethe's Wilhelm Meis- 
ter in 1824, The three religions, or stages of religions, are the 
Ethical, to which all Heathen religions belong, the Philosophical, 



256 NOTES 

and the Christian religion; which somewhat suggests Carlyle's own 
classification at the beginning of the lecture. This fitly closes his 
effort to find the truth in Scandinavian paganism. 

LECTURE II. 
The Hero as Prophet. 

42 — 37. Quackery and fatuity. 43 — 12. Spiritual legerdemain, 
32. Speciosities. A Cagliostro. 44 — 23. Walk in a vain show. 36. 
Hearsays. 45 — 8. An Inanity and Theatricality. 13. Simulacrum. 
In this opening section Carlyle opposes almost all of his favorite 
words for what is vain and false to the genuineness and sincerity of 
the "Great Man." These words explain each other. Cagliostro 
was an Italian count of the eighteenth century, a great charlatan 
and swindler, concerning whom Carlyle had already written an 
interesting essay. 

43 — 2. Grotius. Hugo Grotius was a Dutch scholar of the 
seventeenth century. 

43 — 24. A false man cannot build a brick house. The thought 
of this passage is duplicated in Emerson's essay on The Sover- 
eignty of Ethics. 

44 — 4. Mirabeau is another favorite subject of Carlyle. See his 
essay on Mirabeau and his account of him in The French Revolution. 
His two later references to Mirabeau in this book (pages 77 and 217) 
show why Carlyle includes him in this place. 

44 — 18. He cannot help being sincere. Cooper, in his Deer- 
slayer, gives a charming account of how the simple-minded hero 
is unable to comprehend at all what is meant when he is asked to 
break his pledge to return to the Indians. Carlyle applies this type 
of sincerity to Johnson (p. 175.) 

44 — 37. It glares-in upon him. The flame-image mentioned 
above (line 24). The italicising of this "it" gives us a peculiar 
sense of the unspeakable something which compels the "original" 
man's thought ever back from the appearance to the reality behind 
it. The figure is suggested by Plato's cave. The thought in the 
following lines is Platonic. 

45 — 31. It is not in man that walketh to direct his steps. Jer- 
emiah X, 23. Note what a cluster of biblical references and phrases 
occur here. For The man according to God's own heart see 1 
Samuel xiii, 14, and Acts xiii, 22. As no other man's words (44 — 34) 
Is a reference to the impression made by Jesus: "Never man 



NOTES 257 

spake like this man'' {John vii, 46). So fearful and wonderful 
(44 — 21) is an echo of Psalms cxxxix, 14; Walketh in a vain show 
is Psalms xxxix, 6; and Inspiration of the Almighty is Job xxxii, 8. 

46 — 8. Man can do no other. The famous phrase of Luther, 
"I can do no other." (See p. 131, 1.26.) 

46 — 21. Their country. Another nature description; notice the 
style. 

^4.7 — 12. Sale. George Sale, who translated the Koran in 1734, 
and wrote a preliminary discourse to it, to which Carlyle here 
refers. 

47 — 17. Religiosity is commonly used now in a disparaging sense. 
With Carlyle, of course, no quality could be higher. 

47 — 19. Sabeans. See note on 9 — 29. 

48 — 8. The Horse. Job xxxix, 19, and xli, 29. The second 
phrase is not applied to the horse, though the idea is contained in 
Job xxxix, 25. 

48 — 16. Black Stone, a sacred stone, which the pilgrims always 
kiss. Diodorus Siculus was a Greek historian. Silvestre de Sacy 
was a French orientalist who had died two years before. The Well 
which Hagar found was miraculously revealed to her (Genesis 
xxi, 19), and so would be regarded as a miraculous well. Twenty- 
seven cubits would be nearly fifty feet. 

48 — 37- Keblah is an Arabic word, meaning visible point in the 
horizon. That which leads men to seek something visible in their 
impulse toward religious worship is explained by Carlyle (with a 
reference to this very Black Stone) in his well-known pass- 
age on idolatry, in his lecture on "The Hero as Priest" (pp. 117 ff). 

48 — 38. From Delphi ... to Morocco. Practically all followers 
of Mahomet are included in these limits. See the last paragraph 
of the lecture. 

53 — 30. Alpha and Omega. It is a common metonymy to take 
the first and last letters of the Greek alphabet as all-inclusive. "I 
am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end, the first 
and the last" (Revelation xxii, 13). 

53 — 31. That he looks through the shows of things into things. 
Carlyle arrays all of his heroes on the side of truth, seeing into the 
very heart of things, their inner meaning, and not being misled by 
the outer appearance of them. 

54 — 6. Heraclius and Chosroes are mentioned because they were 
the two most conspicuous contemporary monarchs. Carlyle is tak- 
ing Mahomet's own point of view, as he often does, rather abruptly, 
with his heroes. 
17 



258 NOTES 

54 — II. Sheik. The word means elder, or eldest, and is a title 
of dignity applied to the head of a tribe, or more often to a religious 
person of the highest order. 

54 — 17. Ramadhan. The ninth month of the Mahometan year, 
during which the great fast was prescribed. It corresponds some- 
what to the Christian Lent. 

54 — 21. * Small still voices.' It is curious that Carlyle trans- 
poses the adjectives. He refers to the "still small voice" through 
which God spoke to Elijah (1 Kings xix, 12). 

55 — 10. Pretension of scanning. This suggests both the biblical 
"canst thou by searching find out God?" {J oh xi, 7) and Pope's 
"Presume not God to scan" (Essay on Man). 

55 — 23. Not victorious otherwise. Emerson elaborates this idea 
in his essay on the Over-Soul. 

55 — 35* Though He slay me. Joh xiii, 15. 

55 — 37. Annihilation of Self. This is at the very heart of the 
teaching of Jesus: "He that findeth his life shall lose it, and he 
that loseth his life for my sake shall find it" {Matthew x, 39). The 
spiritually minded have always taught this doctrine. Carlyle was 
familiar with the phrase in Novalis. 

56 — 7. To get into the truth of anything, is ever a mystic act. 
This is a fundamental position with Carlyle as with all mystics. 
We can never know the deepest things by the processes of logic. 

58 — II. Could do no other. Luther's phrase again. Note how 
Carlyle always makes the mission of his heroes seem inevitable to 
them. So Luther and Knox keep silent as long as they can, and 
speak only when they must. 

58 — 30. Some rider's horse. This refers to a special incident in 
Mahomet's life, in which the pursuer is said to have thought the 
accident to be due to Mahomet's supernatural power, and to have 
been converted forthwith. 

59 — 5. Hegira. This Mahometan era was not instituted until 
seventeen years later, seven years after Mahomet's death. 

61 — 18. Homoiousion and Homoousion. From Greek words 
meaning " similar substance" and "same substance." The belief 
that Christ was of similar substance to God was held by Arius; 
that he was of the same substance was believed by Athanasius. 
At the Council of Nicea, in 325, the controversy was settled 
in favor of the latter. The dispute marks all the difference between 
Unitarians and Trinitarians, and as such is more than a "vain jang- 
ling," as Carlyle afterwards came to perceive. 

64 — 14. Prideaux. His book, entitled The True Nature of Irri' 



NOTES 259 

posture fully display'd in the life of Mahomet, was first printed in 
1697. 

65 — 18. Inspiration of a Gabriel. The Mahometans had a tradi- 
tion that the angel Gabriel brought the Koran to Mahomet. Carlyle 
tries to find the origin of this tradition in Mahomet's own possible 
belief that ideas so wonderful and beautiful as his must have been 
given to him by a direct inspiration. It is very common for men 
to believe that God has directly spoken to them, or that they have 
written under the direct control of some divine agency. In Plato's 
Ion, Socrates feels that he is speaking so well that he must be 
inspired by some god. 

65 — 26. A mess of pottage, for which Esau sold his birthright to 
Jacob {Genesis xxv, 34). Hence the forfeiting of one's right to a 
spiritual blessing for any insignificant worldly good — in Mahomet's 
case mere temporal ambition. 

66 — 4. Hud. One of the prophets mentioned in the Koran but 
not in the Bible, though some have identified him with Heber (1 
Chronicles vii, 31). 

66 — 26. Mahomet can work no miracles. This paragraph is a 
free rendering of various ideas in the Koran which seem especially 
striking to Carlyle. Mahomet several times directly disclaims to 
be more than merely a preacher. 

67 — 30. Material world is . . . Nothing. Carlyle is again mixing 
in philosophical ideas where they do not belong. I can find no trace 
of actual mysticism in the Koran. 

68 — 14. Well forgotten. Well, in the sense of quite. The pass- 
age would read better to us now with the word omitted. 

70 — I. His last words. Given in Muir's Life of Mahomet (Lon- 
don, 1878), chapter xxxiii, p. 508. "Lord, grant me pardon; and 
join me to the companionship on high." This was followed by 
"broken ejaculations" to the same effect. 

70 — 7. The Lord giveth. Job i, 21. 

72 — 5. Too. As well as according to Christianity. 

72 — 9. The tenth part. The biblical tithe, from which undoubt- 
edly Mahomet took his idea. 

73 — 12. Ramadhan. See note on 54 — 17. 

74 — 3. Bentham. Jeremy Bentham, an English Utilitarian philos- 
opher who had died eight years before, was the most influential 
writer on ethics of this time. John Stuart Mill, who was to some 
extent a follower of Bentham, was in attendance at this lecture, 
and when Carlyle said "beggarlier and falser view of man," he rose 
and answered "No!" 



260 NOTES 

74 — 3. Paley. William Paley was a theologian of the latter half 
of the eighteenth century. He taught that we should do the right 
because that would enable us to get to heaven when we died, and 
avoid the wrong in order to escape the penalties of hell. To Carlyle 
this seemed a merely prudential calculation, — " virtue by Profit and 
Loss," which was not true virtue at all. 

75 — 5. Papuans. Inhabitants of New Guinea. 

75 — 14. Arabia is at Grenada. By 642 the Saracens had con- 
quered Delhi, and by 714 they had conquered Grenada. 

LECTURE III. 

The Hero as Poet. 

76 — 23. The Hero can be Poet, Prophet, King, Priest or what 

you will. The basis of this belief and the justification for it Carlyle 
has already stated (p. 27, 1. 18). A hero is "a hero at all points" 
because he is a hero "in the soul and thought of him first of all." 
He returns to this thought in speaking of several of his heroes. 

77 — II. Austerlitz Battles. Because Austerlitz was one of his 
most sweeping and brilliant victories ; it was over the Austrians and 
Russians, in 1805. 

77 — II. Louis Fourteenth's Marshals. Tallard was perhaps the 
most notable. They are rather a curious choice in this place. 

77 — 13. Turenne is chosen here for the sake of conformity; he 
was a French general of the seventeenth century. 

78 — 7. Vates is the Latin for prophet ; and for poet because pro- 
phetic utterances were given in verse. The usual word for poet is 
poeta. 

78 — 12. * The open secret.' It is sufficient here to interpret the 
passage as meaning that the poet or prophet sees through the 
appearance of things into their inner meaning, and that all may 
come to do so, though few actually do. The free interpretation of 
the thought of Fichte which follows is a clear enough statement of 
the philosophical side. 

78 — 17. Fichte. The first of the great successors of Kant, to 
whom Carlyle is deeply indebted for his philosophical ideas. 

78 — 25. The Satirist. This has been explained as meaning Car- 
lyle himself, as he had developed this idea in his Sartor ResarUis. 
It could not refer to Fichte, as Fichte was no satirist and does not 
make use of this figure. It seems rather to mean any satirist who 
would put the materialistic theory of the world in a ridiculous 
light. 



NOTES 261 

78 — 29. Live ever. Supply "if we do not." 

79 — 4. Whosoever May Live. At first reading this gives just the 
wrong impression. Read: ''Whoever else may live in the shows 
of things, it is for him (the Prophet or Poet) a necessity/' etc. 

79 — 20. " Consider the lilies." Matthew vi, 28. 

79 — 33. Vauxhall. A London place of amusement described in 
Thackeray's Vanity Fair, chapter vi. See also Addison's Spectator 
paper (Number 383), "Sir Roger at Vauxhall." 

80 — 3. The ' imagination that shudders.' Quoted from his essay 
on Bums. 

81 — 5. The inward harmony of coherence which is its soul. 
This idea on its philosophical side Carlyle derived from Pythagoras 
through Plato. Notice that Carlyle again assumes the truth of the 
theory he is speaking of and draws the absolute conclusion that 
one who looks deeply enough will see into the heart of things and 
find it musical. 

83 — 33. Giotto. Dante's contemporary and fellow-citizen was 
the first of that remarkable line of Florentine artists which included 
Raphael, Michael Angelo, and others. What is commonly known 
as the Giotto portrait was discovered in July, 1840, in the ancient 
chapel of the Podesta at Florence. It is often called the "Lost 
Portrait" from its having been hidden by the whitewash. But 
though this was discovered just when Carlyle was revising his 
lecture for publication, it was another portrait, not by Giotto, to 
which he refers. 

84 — 20. * Mystic unfathomable song.' Quoted from Tieck, in a 
passage Carlyle had previously translated. See p. 88, 1. 3. Tieck 
was a contemporary German writer, notable for his translation of 
Shakespeare. 

84 — 35. Chiaroscuro. An Italian word meaning the art of com- 
bining light and shade in painting. 

85 — 18. Prior, Podesta. Dante was at one time a Prior of 
Florence, and Carlyle speaks of his Priorship below (line 31). In- 
deed, it is to Dante's being Prior that he refers above (line 2). The 
Podesta was more like the "Lord Mayor" mentioned three lines 
below. 

85 — 31. Guelf-Ghibelline, Bianchi-Neri. The former is one of the 
chief conflicts in Italian history. The Guelfs favored the pope and 
the Ghibellines the German emperor in the long struggle for su- 
premacy between these rivals. 

86 — 15. Come ^ duro calle. Quoted from the Paradiso, canto 
xvii, line 59. Cacciaguida says, in prophesying to Dante of his 



262 NOTES 

future wanderings and hardships, " Thou shalt prove . . . how hard 
is the path to descend and to mount upon the stair of another." 

87 — II. Malebolge Pool. Described in the Inferno, canto xviii, 
the opening Unes. 

87 — 12. Alti guai. Deep groans. 

87 — 24. * If thou follow thy star.' Inferno, canto xv, line 55. 

87 — 28. Could know otherwise. We find that the labor was 
great, that it made him 'lean for many years,' in the Paradiso, in 
the opening lines of canto xxv. But we could know this otherwise, 
— by the very nature of the work itself. 

87 — 31. His Book. Though he composed other works of the 
highest order, the Divina Commedia is peculiarly Dante's " Book." 
He explains that he called it a comedy because it began with Hell, 
and ended with Paradise, thus closing happily. The three parts. 
Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso, make one complete "divine" 
comedy. 

88 — 38. Canto fermo. Steady song. "It proceeds as by a chant," 
having that regularity and solemnity. 

89 — I. Terza rima. The Divine Comedy is written in three-line 
stanzas, every line ending with an unaccented syllable, which gives 
a wonderful cadence, not wearisome in the softer Italian as it 
would be in English. The scheme of rhymes is as follows: aba, 
b c b, c d c, d e d, etc. 

90 — 13. Hall of Dite. Inferno, canto viii, line, 70 £f. 

90 — 17. Tacitus, the Latin historian of the first century, to 
whom we are indebted for the earliest knowledge we possess of our 
Teutonic ancestors, is noted for his great brevity of style. 

90 — 23. Plutus . . . Virgil's rebuke . . . Brunetto Latini. These 
illustrations of Dante's incisive diction and vivid picturing are 
taken from the Inferno, canto vii, line 13 ff and canto xv, line 2 ff. 
Virgil was Dante's guide. Brunetto Latini had been his early 
schoolmaster. The "fiery snow" mentioned in the next line is 
taken from canto xiv, line 29. The tombs referred to below are 
described in canto ix, line 112, and canto x, lines 1 ff and 115 ff. 

90 — 32. How Farinata rises; and how Cavalcante falls. Fari- 
nata, who had been leader of the Ghibellines, was a man of great 
haughtiness, and he "rises," draws up his head and chest, "as if he 
had Hell in great disdain," Inferno x, 35 ff. Cavalcante falls down 
with grief on learning from Dante of the death of his son. Inferno 
X, 52 ff. 

91 — 3. Physiognomical. One of Carlyle's unusual words, used to 
make graphic the familiar thought that "style Is the man." 



NOTES * 263 

92 — I. Aer bruno. Brown (gloomy) air. 

92 — 3. Francesca and Paolo, perhaps the most famous lovers in 
all literature, are described in lines 80-142 of canto v of the Inferno t 
in what is the best known and perhaps the most beautiful passage 
in the entire poem. 

92 — 30. A Dio. Inferno, canto iii, 1. 63. Non ragionam, iii, 51. 
Non han speranza, iii, 46. The lines all occur in the well-known pas- 
sage referring to the angels which were not rebellious, but still were 
for themselves and not for God. Dante regards them as inferior 
to those who rebelled, and so gives them the worst of punishments. 

93 — 8. Byronism of taste. The prevailing taste at this time was 
for the morbid, gloomy style of Byron's poetry, and Carlyle was 
right in feehng that this was cheap and temporary. But in this 
comparison with the Inferno Carlyle is scarcely warranted. 

93 — 16. Tremolar dell' onde. Purgatorio i, 117, ii, 115, 116, but 
misquoted. The wandering Two are of course Dante and Virgil. 

93 — 24. Giovanna. Purgatorio canto viii, 1. 70 £f. Corbels, 
canto X, 1. 130 ff. • 

94 — 30. Gehenna. The lowest pit of Inferno. 

95 — 3. Men do not believe an Allegory. A recurrence to the 
thought on page 7, line 5. , 

96 — 18. The oldest Hebrew prophet. This does not refer to Job, 
as has been suggested, nor to Amos, the oldest of the Hebrew 
prophets, but to any — the oldest even, — of Hebrew prophets. 

97 — 5. Somewhat. In the sense of something. 

97 — 8. Utilities. Another of Garlyle's onslaughts on the Utili- 
tarian philosophy. Compare note 74 — 3. 

97 — 24. As a pure star. Compare the famous line from Words- 
worth's sonnet on Milton, — 

"Thy soul was like a star, and dwelt apart." 

97 — 35. Caliph Thrones and Arabian Conquests; continuing the 
contrast with Mahomet. 

98 — 5. Piasters. Coins used as a standard of value in some 
countries of Europe as well as in Africa and Asia. 

98 — 15. Shakespeare . . . the Outer Life. This is a true and 
penetrating criticism. Compare the following from Mr. H. W. 
Mabie: "If to his [Shakespeare's] other gifts had been added the 
spiritual insight of Dante, he would have been not only the foremost 
but the ultimate interpreter of the life of the race." William Shake- 
speare: Poet, Dramatist, and Man. 

98^ — 38. Warwickshire Squire. Sir Thomas Lucy, whom Carlyle 



264 NOTES 

mentions by name just below, and to whose prosecution of the poet 
he refers again toward the close of the lecture, p. 109, 1. 30. 

99 — 19. The Tree Igdrasil, that has its roots down in the king- 
doms of Hela and Death. This very expression Carlyle used in his 
first mention of it, p. 20, 1. 7. 

99 — 35. King-Henrys, Queen-Elizabeths. Although Henry VIII 
and Elizabeth had secured the triumph of Protestantism in Eng- 
land, yet, Carlyle implies, Shakespeare, the "noblest product" of 
Catholicism, made his appearance none the less. Of course this 
does not mean that Shakespeare himself was a Romanist, for he was 
not. 

99 — 38. Debate at St. Stephen's, on the hustings. St. Stephen's 
is a part of the House of Commons; the hustings is a platform for 
Parliamentary candidates. 

100 — 2. Freemason's was a popular London tavern. It was here 
that, a month after these lectures were delivered, Carlyle and others 
founded the London library. 

loi — 14. Let there be light. Genesis i, 3. Carlyle's thought 
here had been anticipated by Emerson in his Divinity School 
Address; "He only can give, who has; he only can create, who is," 
etc. • 

102 — 38. The crabbed old Schoolmaster. From a letter Carlyle 
wrote to Emerson we find this to have been a real person. Emer- 
son-Carlyle Correspondence, i, 205. 

104 — I. A thoroughly immoral man could not know anything. 
This reminds us of Socrates' famous doctrine that sin is merely 
ignorance. In Carlyle this becomes a less warrantable theory. 

104 — ^^31. Unconscious intellect. Compare Emerson's 

"They builded better than they knew, 
The conscious stone to beauty grew." 

105 — 5. Nature's highest reward. Another infusion of Carlyle's 
mysticism. 

105 — 32. If his own heroic heart had never suffered. Com- 
pare the same thought in Lowell's Commemoration Ode — 

" How could poet ever tower. 
If his passions, hopes, and fears, 
If his triumphs and his tears. 
Kept not measure with his people?" 

105 — 38. Never ... a good hater. The only character in all 
Shakespeare's plays for whom he seems to have a personal antipathy 
is Angelo in Measure for Measure. 



NOTES 265 

io6 — 10. Crackling of thorns. Ecclesiastes vii, 6. 

io6 — 12. Dogberry and Verges. The clown watchmen in Much 
Ado About Nothing. 

io6 — 22. In Wilhelm Meister. Book iv, chapter iii, to book v, 
chapter xii. 

io6 — 23. Schlegel. A contemporary German writer, best remem- 
bered for his Lectures on Dramatic Literature. 

106 — 33. That battle of Agincourt. See Henry V, act iv, scene 
iv. The "And you, good yeomen" speech comes at the battle of 
Harfleur, act iii, scene i. 

107 — 22. Shakespeare had to write for the Globe Playhouse. 
Compare his own complaint of the limitation this imposed on him, 
in the opening chorus of Henry V: — 

"Can this cockpit hold 
The vasty fields of France? or may we cram 
Within this wooden O the very casques 
That did affright the air at Agincourt?" 

107 — 29. Disjected membra. Scattered bits, — no expression of 
the man's complete self. 

107 — 35. Tophet. 2 Kings xxiii, 10, 11; Isaiah xxx, 33. 

107 — 36. That scroll in Westminster Abbey. This is suggested 
to Carlyle by the quotation above. The passage from The Tempest 
(act iv, scene i) in which occurs the line "We are such stuff as 
dreams are made of" is inscribed on a roll held in the hand of the 
statue of Shakespeare in Westminster Abbey. 

no — 18. New Holland. Australia. 

no — 37. Parametta is a town in New South Wales. "King 
Shakespeare" has his dominion over the whole English-speaking 
world. 

Ill — 15. He cannot yet speak. Since 1840, however, Russia has 
found her voice in Tolstoi and Tourgeneff and many other notable 
writers. 

LECTURE IV. 

The Hero as Priest. 

"3 — 38. Fortunately the Reformer too. Strangely enough, all 
the editions read "unfortunately." But this could scarcely be 
Carlyle 's meaning. Not only would it be absurd to say that the 
continued appearance of reformers was "unfortunate," but the 
reference to the poet "too" puts the matter beyond dispute. At 



266 NOTES 

the beginning of the previous lecture Carlyle noted that "the Poet 
is a heroic figure . . . whom the newest age as the oldest may 
produce," etc. (page 76, line 10). 

114 — 4. Saint Dominies and Thebaid Eremites. Founders of the 
Dominican order and hermits in Egypt. These were necessary pre- 
cursors of Dante. Supply "and" before "there had been," to 
make the passage clearer. 

1 14 — 7. Cranmer. The famous Archbishop of Canterbury of the 
sixteenth century who was burned at the stake during the Catholic 
reign of Queen Mary. For Carlyle 's reason. in choosing Ulfilas see 
note on 20 — 27. Sir Walter Raleigh and Cranmer are chosen be- 
cause they were the immediate predecessors of Shakespeare whom 
Carlyle considers as prophets of the "true Catholicism." 

114 — 9. Has reached perfection and is finished. Compare the 
following from Ruskin: "From the moment when a perfect picture 
is painted or a perfect statue wrought within a state, that state 
begins to derogate. The Two Paths, Lecture 1, "The Deteriorative 
Powers of Conventional Art over Nations." 

114 — 13. Orpheus. Refers to the familiar Greek myth in which 
Orpheus with his wonderful music charmed the trees, rocks, and 
"rude creatures." 

114 — 21. Become obstructions; and need to be shaken-oflf. Car- 
lyle 's version of the familiar saying that the heterodoxy of to-day 
becomes the orthodoxy of to-morrow. 

114 — 34. Nothing will continue. Compare Teimyson's 
"And God fulfils himself in many ways 
Lest one good custom should corrupt the world." 

— Morte d^ Arthur. 

114 — 36. Progress of the Species. Here Carlyle differs greatly 
from Emerson, who constantly preached this doctrine. Evolution 
had been much discussed before this time, especially by the German 
writers Herder and Oken. Darwin's Origin of Species did not 
appear, however, until nearly twenty years after this time. 

116 — 4. Shakespeare's noble Feudalism. Shakespeare's loyalty to 
king and the whole aristocratic or "feudal" idea is shown not only 
in the tone of his plays but more specifically in his dedications, and 
in his having secured the knighting of his father. The assertion of 
the rights of the common man, which culminated in the French 
Revolution, had not begun in his time. 

116 — 31. Schweidnitz Fort. The incident was said to have oc- 
curred in 1761, during the Seven Years' War. In his History of 
Frederick the Great (book xx, chapter viii), Carlyle narrates the 



NOTES 267 

story but regards it as "greatly exaggerated." Compare Victor 
Hugo's graphic account of the battle of Waterloo, where, however, 
the men were pushed into the sunken road by the pressure of those 
behind. An incident like this might easily have caused the story. 

117 — 3. Tends to reckon his own insight as final. This was 
the chief charge brought against the Transcendentalists, and the 
philosophy to which Carlyle himself adhered. 

117 — 9. Misknow. This is a good illustration of Carlyle 's happy 
coinings. In the prefix "mis" as here applied there is the sugges- 
tion of a wilful perversion, perhaps because of its analogy to "mis- 
judge." Yet note how different the efTect would be if he had 
written "misjudge" or "mistake." 

117 — II. All uniforms. An interesting parallel to this occurs in 
Kipling's Ballad of the East and West. The whole story is written 
to illustrate the text that 

"There is neither east nor west, border nor breed nor birth, 
When two strong men stand face to face, though they come from 
the ends of the earth." 

117 — 12. The Arab turban. In effect Carlyle combines the two 
sentences: — all uniforms, all fashions of arms, — the Arab turban 
and swift scimetar. Note how this rapid shifting and readjustment 
heightens the effect. 

117 — 15. Not against us. The same thought is in Jesus' rebuke 
to his disciples. 

117 — 32. Any the most. Another of Carlyle 's odd expressions, but 
one which has its peculiar gain. Read the passage omitting either 
word, or supplying "even," and note the difference in the effect. 

118 — 21. As the thing. The sentence is not clear. Perhaps 
Carlyle means that what chiefly provokes the prophet is not what 
the image symbolizes, but the image itself, which he perceives to 
be "mere wood." This is in accordance with his general thought, 
but the sentence does not granunatically make sense. Occasionally 
Carlyle 's elliptical habit of thought leads him into this violation of 
good style. 

119 — 3. Doubt. In the sense of "suspect"; still a common 
colloquialism. 

119 — ^4. Insincere idolatry. This idea is exemplified on page 174, 
line 26 ff. 

119 — ^4. Doubt has eaten-out the heart of it. Notice the mixed 
metaphor in this sentence: a soul clings spasmodically to an ark 
which it half-feels to have become a phantasm. 



268 NOTES 

119 — 14. Formulism. Not formalism. 

119 — 19. Magnetic sleep. This was written before the term 
"hypnotism" came into use. 

119 — 29. Tetzel's Pardons of Sin. Tetzel brought pardons from 
the pope. The practice of selling these was greatly abused. 

120 — 35. It have. For "it may have." Carlyle is fond of 
omitting the sign of the subjunctive. 

121 — 13. Hogstraten, Tetzel, and Dr. Eck were all bitter op- 
ponents of Luther in his great struggle. 

121 — 19. Bellarmine. A Catholic theologian who lived half a 
century later than Luther, but who had all of the scholastic contro- 
versial instinct of the Middle Ages. 

123 — 4. A man embraces truth. This sentence contains the 
whole of Carlyle 's argument. 

123 — 9. Serpent-queller. It is as such that Spenser's heroes are 
often pictured in the Faerie Queene. The word suggests the idea 
of the succeeding sentence. 

123 — 15. Sansculottism. As often with Carlyle, when an imusual 
word is used, the context suggests the meaning. How Napoleon 
emerged as King out of the ''boundless revolt" of the extreme 
revolutionists, Carlyle considers briefly in his final lecture. 

126 — 22. Blessed discovery. It seems strange that Luther should 
not have known the Bible before becoming a monk, and stranger 
still that he did not immediately see it even then. But he himself 
says that the Bible was seldom found in the hands of the monks; 
and it must be remembered that he entered the convent with no 
previous theological training. 

127 — 3. Augustine Order. There were four orders of monks in 
the Middle Ages, the Augustine, Dominican, Franciscan, and 
Carmelite. That Tetzel belonged to the Dominican Order may be 
conjectured by the reference on page 128, line 15. 

127 — 31. Wasteful orbit. 127 — 34. Providence and God. 128 — 
2. Get lived in honesty. 128 — 14. Sorrowfulest of theories. 128 
— 19. So much as possible. 128 — 33. Futility and sorrowful mock- 
ery. These expressions illustrate respectively Carlyle 's wonderful 
power of condensation, and his occasional meaningless repetitions, 
his coining of idioms, his use of a pet expression in a new connec- 
tion, his introduction of words which exaggerate the feeling without 
altering the sense, and his constant recurrence to his central thought. 

129 — 9. Dooms. This change of tense for the sake of vividness 
is hardly warrantable. 

129 — 12. With Huss, with Jerome. These friends and fellow- 



NOTES 269 

martyrs were burned at the stake within a year of each other. 
Jerome was a disciple both of Huss and of WycHffe. 

129 — 13. Constance Council. Called in 1414. Huss was burned 
at the stake the following year, but the council continued for three 
years more in order to check his influence as well as to regulate some 
other matters. 

129 — 23. These words of mine. The abrupt transition into an 
imaginary quotation never leads Carlyle away from his own peculiar 
style. The emotional identification of himself with his hero some- 
times leads us to fear that the hero is more Carlyle than himself. 

131 — 6. Whosoever denieth me. Matthew x, 33; Luke xii, 9. 

132 — 10. Could not help coming. Is this consistent with "It had 
all been otherwise" of the last paragraph? 

133 — s* The speculation that Popery is on the increase. This 
was written at the very height of the Oxford Movement (1833-1844), 
when the Catholic reaction was strongest in England. 

134 — 32. Karlstadt and other Reformation preachers carried 
Luther's protest to the point of breaking images and creating dis- 
orders. Such practices Luther himself consistently opposed. The 
extremes to which the Anabaptists at Munster carried the Reforma- 
tion in 1532, and the Peasants' War, or insurrection, in South Ger- 
many in 1525, were also issues in which Luther's moderation was 
tested. 

136 — 32. Cowper. This English poet of the latter part of the 
eighteenth century is noted for his religious sensitiveness and for 
his melancholy. 

137 — 14' Patmos. Since it was from the isle of Patmos that St. 
John saw his great vision, Carlyle appropriately uses this name for 
Luther's retreat. 

138 — 4. Kranach. This artist was a personal friend of Luther, 
and so portrays him sympathetically. 

139 — 16. We may censure Puritanism. Here, as often, Carlyle's 
attitude is the opposite of Macaulay's. While Carlyle saw the 
genuineness, Macaulay saw chiefly the cruelty and the crudeness. 
Note his famous comment that the Puritans objected to bear- 
baiting, " not because it gave pain to the bear, but because it gave 
pleasure to the spectators." 

139 — 24. The Mayflower did not sail from Delft Haven, but from 
Southampton. But this is only a slight mistake, as another of the 
Pilgrim Fathers' boats did sail from there. 

139 — 34. Starchamber. An ancient court consisting of seven 
judges of the king's privy council, without jury and without appeal. 



270 NOTES 

Charles I used it as a general court to exact fines for his own ex- 
chequer. In this court Hampden was prosecuted for refusing to 
pay ship money. It was held in a chamber of the palace of West- 
minster, but why called "Starchamber" is not definitely known. 

142 — 9. Three-times-three. The giving of three cheers three 
times over, — forgetful of the suffering and the struggling which 
made the delight and enthusiasm possible. 

142 — 20. That need no forgiveness. Implicit reference to the 
"ninety and nine just persons," I/uke xv, 7. 

143 — 18. Burst into a flood of tears, and ran out. The inci- 
dent reminds us strongly of the famous story of Caedmon, told in 
Bede's Ecclesiastical History. 

144 — 9. Reality ... is alone strong. Compare page 140, line 
12, and page 113, line 25. 

144 — II. Fact. Here as opposed to truth. Carlyle ordinarily uses 
the word in exactly the opposite sense. Compare page 44, line 35, 
and page 79, line 5. 

144 — 13. By sincerity itself, becomes heroic. A supplementary 
thought to that expression on page 122, line 18. 

144^28. Queen Mary. Commonly called Mary Queen of Scots; 
not, of course, Queen Mary of England. 

146 — 27. When the two Prelates. The story is told with con- 
siderable humor in Knox's History of the Reformation in Scotland, 
vol. i, p. 146. 

147 — 29. What pardon can there be? Ironical. Carlyle's real 
meaning appears later in the paragraph. 

148 — 4. Regent Murray. James Stuart, Mary's half brother. 

148 — 14. Hildebrand. Pope Gregory VII. 

LECTURE V. 

The Hero as Man of Letters. 

149 — 21. Copy-rights and copy-wrongs. The pun is hardly justi- 
fied, as "copy-wrongs*' would be a meaningless word in this con- 
nection. 

150 — 8. To amuse idleness. Note that Carlyle, because of the 
intensity of his own nature, regards literature as having a serious- 
ness of purpose which is not to be found in some of the accepted 
poets, Herrick, for example. 

150 — 33. His being is in that. Compare Emerson: "Man is 
related by his form to the -vV^orld about him; by his soul to the 



NOTES 271 

universe," etc. Lectures on Human lAfe, 1838. Cabot's Life of 
Emerson, vol. ii, page 737. 

151 — 7. Fichte. Though Carlyle's statement is not true to the 
fundamental doctrine of this very abstruse philosopher, yet a carer 
ful study of this passage will show the starting-point of the think- 
ing of both Carlyle and Emerson. 

152 — 6. Pillar of Fire. See Exodus xiii, 21. 

153 — 5. The general state of knowledge about Goethe was surely 
not less than that about Mahomet or Odin. Carlyle had already 
written two long essays on Goethe, more than ten years before, but 
they leave rather a vague impression. It is to be greatly regretted 
that he did not include Goethe in this place. 

153 — 27. Disorganized condition of society. So loud was the 
complaint that many attempts were being made to organize society 
according to some definite system. The most notable theory for 
reorganization was that of the Frenchman Fourier. Brook Farm 
was at this time (1840) at the height of its brief success. Other 
experiments, of which there were many in this country, were the 
"New Harmony" of Robert Owen, and "Fruitlands" of Bronson 
Alcott. 

154 — 22. The <ye ... all the other members. See Matthew 
V, 29. 

154 — 30. No one asks. At the present time the opposite of this 
complaint might well be made. 

154 — 37. In Books. Compare Southey's poem To My Books: 

"My days among the dead are past; 

Around me I behold. 
Where'er these casual eyes are cast, 

The mighty minds of old; 
My never-failing friends are they, 
With whom I converse day by day." 

155 — 15. Circulating-library novel. Mr. Carnegie might well 
have taken his inspiration from this passage. "Celia" and "Clif- 
ford" are typical names of the heroes and heroines of sentimental 
novels. I think no particular books are intended. 

155—22. What built St. Paul's Cathedral? This is a rather 
violent straining of his point. The religious spirit which built St. 
Paul's was not produced by the "Book," but the "Book" was the 
record of that. 

156 — 8. Abelard and that metaphysical theology of his. Abelard 
was one of the most brilliant of the Middle Age Christian philoso- 



272 NOTES 

phers (1079-1142). His "metaphysical theology" was called "Con- 
ceptualism." 

158 — 16. The withered mockery of a French sceptic. Reference 
to Voltaire. Recall Carlyle's expletive "withered" applied to him 
before. 

158 — 30. "Witenagemote. From the Anglo-Saxon Witna, wise 
men, and gemot, council. 

158 — 36. Three Estates. The Lords Spiritual, the Lords Tem- 
poral, and the Commons. The cause for Burke's remark (not Car- 
lyle's, as the punctuation might lead one to suppose) was that the 
reporters had with much difficulty established their place in Parlia- 
ment, in the "Reporters' Gallery"; so that thereafter the Press was 
a "Fourth Estate." 

160 — 7. Senatus Academicus. The college or university. 

160 — II. If Men of Letters. This sentence is the "text" of the 
present lecture. 

160 — 24. A great way off. Perhaps not so far as Carlyle thought. 
The French dramatists are organized into a "Guild" which com- 
pletely controls the situation; and there are other indications that 
Carlyle's dream may soon be fully realized. Whether it will result 
as he imagined is extremely doubtful. The present organizations 
are too much concerned with the "furtherance of cash" to have 
suited him. 

161 — 10. Contradiction. As, for example, in the saying, "If any 
man desire to be first, the same shall be the last of all, and servant 
of all" {Mark ix, 35). 

161 — 17. Till the nobleness of those who did so. The reference 
to religious mendicant orders is somewhat unfortunate, considering 
how ofteii the vows of poverty were abused. The Friar in Chaucer's 
Prologue to the Canterbury Tales is a classic example. "There was 
a friar, a wanton and a merry one, — a licensed beggar, and a very 
important person. In all the four orders there was no one who knew 
so much of dalliance and flattery," etc. 

162 — 18. Harnessed to the yoke of Printer Cave. Edward Cave 
was the first editor of the Gentleman's Magazine. He gave Johnson 
what employment he could, and Johnson wrote an appreciative life 
of him. Though Cave was in no sense a broad-minded or generous 
man, yet the tone of Carlyle's reference to him is imjustified. Car- 
lyle's intensity leads him astray also in the next line, " Bums dying 
broken-hearted as a Ganger." Burns does not seem to have ob- 
jected seriously to his work, though of course it was uncongenial 
to him. 



NOTES 273 

163 — 12. Punctum saliens. Salient point. 

163 — 21. To make their Men of Letters their Governors. The 
Chinese plan was indeed "very unsuccessful." A most notable 
example in Carlyle's favor, however, is that of the Roman emperor 
Marcus Aurelius. Plato in his Republic worked out a plan in great 
detail, which may have unconsciously influenced Carlyle in this 
passage. The idea was a deep-rooted one with Carlyle. Much later 
he evolved a plan for certain " Queen's members" to be appointed to 
Parliament, and he himself was very desirous of such an appoint- 
ment. 

164 — 20. There is the announcement, audible enough. Espe- 
cially in New England, where the " Transcendentalists " were acting 
on this very principle, that "to say a thing has long been, is no 
excuse for its continuing to be." But with this phrase of "Tran- 
scendentalism" Carlyle was almost wholly out of sympathy. 

164 — 28. The third man for thirty-six weeks. Quoted from his 
own essay on Chartism of the year previous. This essay was an 
appeal to Parliament to consider the question of poverty. This was 
a time of great distress among the poorer classes of England and 
Ireland. 

165 — II. Pandora's Box of miseries. Taken from Greek myth- 
ology. Pandora (=all gifts) was the first woman, and her box con- 
tained all human ills. But at the bottom was Hope, which was a 
recompense for all the rest. 

166 — 6. Air of offended virtue. This recalls the passage, " When 
saw I thee anhungered," etc., Matthew xxv, 44. 

166 — 33. Scepticism ... is not an end, but a beginning. For 
modem philosophy is commonly accounted as beginning with Des- 
cartes' doubting of all things whatsoever, and the first step of his 
positive construction from it, that " I doubt, i.e., think, therefore 
I am." 

167 — 2. Bentham. See note on 74 — 3. 

168 — 3. Caput-mortuum. Dead body, or husk. 

168 — 13. Phalaris'-Bull. A brass bull contrived for Phalaris 
(not by him), as a cruel mode of punishment. It was the inventor, 
Perillus, who was himself roasted to death in it by order of the 
tyrant. 

168 — 24. (TX£<pc^ (skepsis), from which we get our word scepticism, 
in the Greek means merely inquiry. 

170 — 3. Chartisms. Chartism was a movement in favor of pop- 
ular rights. Carlyle's views in this regard changed considerably 
later on. 

18 



274 NOTES 

170 — 22. Thou art not extant, only semblant. Christian Science 
was considerably indebted to the Transcendentalism which pre- 
ceded it. 

170 — 37. The world's being saved will not save us. This re- 
calls Lowell's opening poem of the Biglow Papers : 

" Gov'ment ain't to answer for it, 
God'U send the bill to you." 

171 — 31. Bookseller Osborne and Fourpence-halfpenny a day. 
Osborne employed Johnson, but not at the sum named. 

171 — 36. That they fought truly. So Browning always teaches. 

172 — 3. War of the Giants. The reference may be either to 
Greek or Norse mythology, — more appropriately, perhaps, to the 
latter. 

172 — 6. Expressly or incidentally. Expressly of Johnson and 
Burns, incidentally of Rousseau. . 

173 — 8. Hercules with the burning Nessus'-shirt. The shirt was 
poisoned with the blood of the centaur Nessus, and caused Hercules 
great pain, finally resulting in his death. The subject is treated in 
the Trachinice of Sophocles. Because of Johnson's robustness and 
ugly countenance, as well as of the "incurable misery" of "his 
own natural skin," this comparison is peculiarly appropriate. 

173 — 38. Loyally submissive. Again Carlyle is reading into his 
heroes the qualities which he wishes to find there. His own strong 
sense of obedience and reverence is also to be found in Johnson, 
though scarcely to the extent that Carlyle indicates. But in Bums 
and Rousseau it was a quality most " conspicuous by its absence." 

174 — 13. The happier was it for him that he could. Carlyle 
felt deeply his own inability to adhere to the "old formulas," 
as the whole tendency of his nature led him to do. So in our own 
day Mr. William Watson writes in his poem to Aubrey De Vere: 

" My mind half envying what it cannot share. 
Reveres the reverence which it cannot feel." 

174 — 16. Paper-age. Following the analogy of the Stone Age, 
the Iron Age, etc., the eighteenth century, with its deluge of books, 
periodicals, and pamphlets, is appropriately named "the Paper 
Age." 

174 — 18. The great Fact of this Universe glared in. Recall the 
same expression in the lecture on Mahomet. Note through the next 
tew pages Carlyle 's repetition of phrases he has used before, due to 



NOTES 275 

the insistence on his central point of view in the judging of his 
heroes. 

177 — 9« Buckram style. As buckram is a coarse linen stiffened 
so as to hold its shape, so Johnson's style retains its heavy formality 
no matter what the content of his thought might be. This sentence 
is an admirable characterization of Johnson's style. 

177 — 27. Bozzy. So Boswell was often called, because of his own 
lack of dignity. Johnson himself first applied the name. In his 
essay on BosweU's Life of Johnson Carlyle defends him at more 
length from Macaulay 's contemptuous attitude. See note on 13 — 32. 

177 — 37. Hero to his valet-de-chambre. Carlyte probably knew 
the saying merely as a French proverb, having no special author in 
mind. The saying is found in Montaigne, who probably gave it 
currency, though he was not the originator of it. 

178 — 5. Strip your Louis Quatorze of his king-gear. This is 
hardly just, as Louis XIV was a man of some power. Compare 
Thackeray's amusing description of George IV in the Four Georges: 
" I try and take him to pieces, and find silk stockings, padding, , . . 
under-waistcoats, more under-waistcoats, and then nothing." 

178 — 6. A poor forked radish with a head fantastically carved. 
See 2 Henry IV, act iii, scene i. 

178 — 26. Ultimus Romanorum. In his second essay on Richter 
Carlyle had referred to Johnson as "the last of all the Romans." 
Shakespeare, following Plutarch, has Brutus apply this expression 
to Cassius {Julius Ccesar^ act iii, scene v). Johnson had in him much 
of the Roman stoic. 

178 — 28. Rousseau. One cannot but wonder at his presence here, 
as what hero-qualities he had were of a nature that Carlyle was 
peculiarly unfitted to appreciate. Perhaps Carlyle included him 
from a conscious striving for diversity in his list. Rousseau's cen- 
tral doctrine, that government was merely a contract, by which men 
gave up a portion of their inherent right to liberty in order to secure 
protection, and therefore, if protection and peace were not given, 
were at liberty to break their side of the contract also, was directly 
opposed to Carlyle's own theory of government. His cry of " Back 
to Nature" exerted a stupendous influence in bringing on the 
French Revolution. 

180 — 13. Go and tell. As the *'man of some rank" evidently 
did so, there may be something to be said on Rousseau's side. 

180 — 22. Passionate appeals to Mothers. Especially in his senti- 
mental novel, Emile. 

180 — 33. Withered, mocking Philosophism, Scepticism, and Persi- 



276 NOTES 

flage. So Carlyle always speaks of Voltaire and the encyclopsedists. 
See note 14 — 2. But though Rousseau was a philosopher, or free- 
thinker and sage (not a technical philosopher), he was not directly 
connected with this group. 

i8o — 38. Those stealings of ribbons. Rousseau was once con- 
victed of taking some ribbon from the dead body of Mme. de Ver- 
cellis. 

181 — 15. Madame de Stael ... St. Pierre. French novelists of 
the sentimental school. The best known work of the former is 
Corinne ; of the latter, Paul and Virginia. Both wrote under the 
influence of Rousseau. - 

183 — 33. Saxon stuff: strong as the Harz-rock. According to 
Teutonic mythology, the Saxons were made out of the rocks of the 
Harz mountains, — which accounted for their superior hardness. 
The Harz mountains are in North Germany ; the Brocken of Goethe's 
Faust, the scene of many legends of folk-lore, is among these 
mountains. 

184 — 5. A fellow of infinite frolic. An unfortunate expression 
here, because it recalls Hamlet's reminiscence of "poor Yorick, — 
a fellow of infinite jest." 

184 — 9. Old Marquis Mirabeau. Father of the Mirabeau of 
French Revolutionary fame. 

184 — 15. Dew-drops from his mane. Shakespeare's Troilus and 
Cressida, act iii, scene iii, line 225. 

184 — 16. Laughs at the shaking of the spear. See note on 48 — 8. 

184 — 25. Professor Stewart. The famous Dugald Stewart, a Scot- 
tish philosopher. 

184 — 37. Lockhart. l^ore famous for having written the standard 
life of Scott. His Life of Robert Burns, to which Carlyle is here 
referring, was the occasion of the previous essay on Burns. 

185 — 16. Resemble Mirabeau. The son, this time, of whom the 
"old Marquis" had used the expression that he was built on the 
"basis of mirth." 

185 — 36. Bellowed forth Ushers de Breze. When de Br^ze was 
sent by Louis XVI to dissolve the National Assembly, Mirabeau 
burst forth with an angry retort, sending de Breze from the Assembly 
and refusing to be dismissed. The courage of Burns, Carlyle says. 
would have been equal to this. 

187 — 37. From the Artillery Lieutenancy in the Regiment La Fere. 
From the lieutenancy of the artillery regiment La Fere, which he 
held in 1785, when sixteen years of age. 



NOTES 277 

1 88 — 13. Rank is but the guinea-stamp. From Burns' poem, 
"A man's a man for a' that." 

188 — 34. Richter. "The giant Jean Paul." See note on 9 — 18. 

188 — 38. But — ! — The ending of this lecture is often cited as 
an example of Carlyle's perversity of style. It would, however, 
greatly weaken the effect if he had added, " But small honor to those 
who caused their suffering." 

LECTURE VI. 

The Hero as King. 

189 — 12. Able-man. See note on 12 — 3. 

189 — 26. Hustings-speeches. See note on 99 — 38. 

190 — 4. A perfect government. The simplest statement of Car- 
lyle's political creed and of his doctrine of obedience. 

191 — 12. Sansculottism. See note on 123 — 15. 

191 — 22. To assert. This sentence shows why Carlyle chooses 
two heroes who were neither of them hereditary kings. 

192 — 3. God's law is in that. "Servants, be subject to your 
masters with all fear," 1 Pet&r ii, 18. 

192 — 8. Loyalty and Royalty. A pleasing case of assonance. 

192 — 9. The modern error. Derived from the English philoso- 
pher Hobbes. 

193 — II. Papa. That is, Pope. 

193 — 14. Camille Desmoulins. Guillotined during the Reign of 
Terror, 1794. 

193 — 14. Aux armes! To arms! 

194 — 7. Niebuhr. Best known for his History of Rome. The 
point is somewhat strained, as Niebuhr died of inflammation of the 
limgs, contracted while reading the war news. 

194 — 10. Racine. The French classical dramatist, contemporary 
with Corneille and Moliere. 

196 — 3. Bending before men. Quoted from Novalis. 

197 — 13. Simon de Montfort. Earl of Leicester, who opposed 
King Henry III. 

197 — 25. Laud and his King. The famous Archbishop Laud, who 
opposed Puritanism in England under Charles I. He was executed 
in 1645. 

199 — 35. Charles Second and his Rochesters. The Earl of Roch- 
ester (John Wilmot) was one of the Restoration poets, a contem- 
porary of Dryden. 



278 NOTES 

200 — 1 8. Eliot, Hampden, Pym, nay Ludlow, Hutchinson, Vane 
himself. Note the delicate shading with which these Puritan lead- 
ers are distinguished. By contrasting Cromwell favorably with the 
first three, Carlyle feels that he need say nothing of the others. 

200 — 20. Conscript Fathers. So the Roman Senators were called. 

200 — 31. Tartufe. Moliere's great play of Tartufe depicts in the 
hero a consummate hypocrite. 

201 — 7. Got to seem. We would say, " Has come to seem." 

201 — 24. Measured euphemisms. Carlyle perhaps means eu- 
phuisms. Look up the meaning of the two words. 

201 — 25. Monarchies of Man. Another instance of Carlyle's 
pluralizing. The Monarchy of Man was written in measured, some- 
what euphuistic prose by Sir John Eliot. Note that the ship-money 
tax was opposed by Hampden, so that is only remains to speak of 
"the constitutional eloquence of the admirable Pym" before turning 
to discuss Cromwell in contrast to these three. 

202 — I. Baresark. Or herserk, a furious Norse warrior. It has 
been disputed whether the term is by derivation hare-coat {i.e., 
without armor) or bear-coat, clothed in a bear-skin. Carlyle's fig- 
ures in the remainder of the paragraph show that he took the word 
in the former sense. 

202 — 26. No century, I think, but a rather barren one. This 
passage indicates Carlyle's lack of sympathy with the principles of 
the American Revolution. 

204 — 22. Darkness. Ignorance; or perhaps ill-mindedness. 

204 — 36. The Huntingdon Physician told Sir Philip Warwick. 
Warwick, in his Memoirs, recounts how this story was told him by a 
certain Dr. Simcott. 

205 — 3. Not the symptom of falsehood. There are interesting 
analogies in Bunyan, Joan of Arc, and many others of a sensitive 
religious nature. 

205 — 14. Time and its shows all rested on Eternity. See note 
on 3—18. 

205 — 29. Ever in his great Taskmaster's eye. From Milton's 
" Sonnet on being arrived at the age of twenty-three." 

205 — 32. That matter of the Bedford Fens. An efifort to secure 
drainage. 

205 — 38. Past forty. Compare the ages of Carlyle's heroes on 
beginning their great work with his own age at the time the lectures 
were delivered. 

206 — 12. Dunbar. A battle fought in 1650, in which Cromwell's 
situation was indeed " desperate-looking." 



NOTES 279 

206—13. Worcester. A decided victory of the following year. 

206 — 15. Cavaliers . . . love-locks. The Puritans, or "Round- 
heads," despised the "curls" of the courtiers of the time. 

206 — 32. Hampton-Court negotiations. The long attempt to come 
to terms with the King, in which his insincerity and duplicity were 
fully revealed. 

208 — 18. Is this your King? Recalls the derision with which 
the claim of "the King of the Jews" was greeted. 

208 — 24. Small-debt pie-powder court. These were real courts 
established at fairs to settle small disputes. 

209 — 33. Dainty little Falklands, didactic Chillingworths, diplo- 
matic Clarendons. These were men of Cromwell's time, conspicuous 
for the qualities that Cromwell lacked, — refinement, eloquence, and 
finesse. 

211 — 9. Mammonish, Devilish. " Ye cannot serve God and Mam- 
mon," Matthew vi, 24. Carlyle constructs his first adjective on the 
analogy of the second. 

212 — 20. Wearing his heart upon his sleeve for daws to peck at. 
From Othello, act i, scene i, line 64. 

213 — 13. Fontenelle. A French author of the early eighteenth 
century. 

214 — 5. ^TTcoxpitTJ? (hypocrites), from which we get our word 
hypocrite, was the Greek name for actor. 

215 — 25. That he might ride in gilt carriages to Whitehall. In 
order that. Whitehall was the king's palace in Cromwell's time. 

216: — 6. Corsica Boswell. A reference to Boswell's once going to 
a masquerade as a Corsican chief. He had also been connected with 
a Corsican insurrection and had written a book about the island. 

216 — 17. They are the salt of the Earth. Compare Matthew v, 13. 

216 — 25. Grand Talent. Napoleon is credited with having said 
"the English have a great talent for silence." 

216 — 28. Solomon says. Ecclesiastics iii, 7. 

217 — I. Cato. The reference is to Cato the Censor. The sen- 
tence is a very free translation from Plutarch. 

217 — 9. Seekest thou. Jeremiah xlv, 5. 

217 — 30. Necker. Minister of finance under Louis XVI, but dis- 
missed from office. Gibbon recounts his disappointment, but does 
not exactly "mourn" over him. 

219 — 36. Hume takes this view of Cromwell in his History of Eng^ 
land. 

220 — 12. Antaeus-like. Carlyle translates the myth and symbol- 
izes it. As often as Hercules threw down the giant Antaeus, he rose 



280 NOTES 

again stronger than before. Hercules had therefore to lift him up 
from the earth and strangle him in the air. 

220 — 18. Orson. The "Terror of France" grew up in the forests, 
and was said to have been suckled by a bear. 

220 — 38. Diocletian. The Roman emperor Diocletian abdicated 
his office and returned to his farm. Gibbon mentions his taking 
great pleasure in his cabbages, which he had planted "with his own 
hands." 

221 — 34. Lies the rub. Compare Hamlet's "Ay, there's the rub," 
act iii, scene i, line 65. 

223 — I. Pride's Purges. In 1648 Colonel Pride had " purged" the 
Long Parliament of more than three-fourths of its members, by 
bringing in two regiments and with this backing dictating who 
should remain. The fifty-one who were left constituted the " Rump 
Parliament." 

223 — 7. Godwin. The father-in4aw of the poet Shelley, author of 
Political Justice : a History of the Commonwealth, in four volumes. 

224 — 2. Milton. The poet Milton was Latin Secretary imder 
Cromwell. The "applause" comes in his sonnet beginning "Crom- 
well, our chief of men." 

227 — 9. Ultra vires. The passage is over-condensed. The his- 
tories of Cromwell, written in the succeeding, scepticaL century (the 
eighteenth), take the word of Lord Clarendon, for example, and 
contend that the great Puritan Revolution was based on mere 
"heats and jealousies." But it is beyond these men to interpret 
Cromwell; scepticism has no gift for writing about belief. 

227 — 32. Pitt, Pombal, Choiseul. Conspicuous prime ministers 
of the eighteenth century, who governed England, Portugal, and 
France, respectively. 

228 — 13. His poor mother. Carlyle's own mother must have 
been in his mind in writing this fine passage. The ending of this 
account of Cromwell is justly famed as one of Carlyle's highest 
reaches of sympathetic interpretation. 

229 — 30. Encyclopedies. See note on 14 — 31. 

229 — 31. This was the Length. There is nothing for "this" to 
refer to. By implication, it is his answer to the savans, given on 
the next page. 

230 — 27. His savans, Bourrienne tells us. Bourrienne was Napo- 
leon's secretary. The savans were scholars who went with him to 
Egypt to further the learning of France. 

231 — 21. La carriere. Literally, the career is open to talents; 
that is, to those who have talents. 



NOTES .281 

231 — 37. Peace of Leoben. In 1797. Between Napoleon and the 
Austrians. 

232 — II. Through Wagrams, Austerlitzes. Napoleon's victory at 
Austerlitz was in 1805, over the Austrians and Russians; Wagram 
was his final victory over the Austrians, in 1809. 

232 — 20. La Fere. See note on 187 — 37. 

232 — 30. Given up to strong delusion. 2 Thessalonians ii, 11. 

233 — I. Pope's Concordat. An agreement between Napoleon and 
Pius VII, by which the French Republic and the Church of Rome 
agreed to recognize each other. 

233 — 3. La vaccine de la religion. The vaccination of religion. 
Napoleon told Cabanis that he expected from this Concordat that in 
fifty years there would be no religion in France. 

233 — 6. Augereau. One of Napoleon's generals. According to 
Bourrienne (note on 230 — 27), the remark was made to Napoleon 
himself on the occasion of his coronation in 1805. 

233 — 30. Duke of Weimar. Best known as Goethe's patron and 
friend. 

233 — 38. Palm. He was courtmartialled and shot for publishing 
a pamphlet against Napoleon. 

234 — 12. Ebauche. Sufficiently translated in the following 
phrase. 

234 — 21. Oleron. A small island belonging to France. 

235— 3. Our last. Carlyle's farewell to his audience might seem 
a trifle insincere to one who remembered that he described men as 
" mostly fools," But his emotions of sympathy and friendly interest 
were aroused by the study of his heroes, and he felt deeply the diffi- 
culty of the subject andfhe cordial reception that had been accorded 
him by an audience that indeed had in it "something of what is 
best in England." 



\ 



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